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What If Consciousness Comes First?

• barberousse 7y ago
  I thought it was fascinating as I read the thesis statement that over two hundred years later we still haven't left Immanuel Kant's orbit. The author ended the article citing Kant's proposition that space and time belong to the mind rather than as properties of external reality however Kant directly answers her question, paraphrasing, "What is it that lends perception the power of perceiving", to which Kant answers with a technical term, original apperception, which more concretely means that the structure of consciousness, no matter its belonging to subjectivity (so-called empirical apperception, your spontaneous sense of selfhood), is itself objective (those terms are actually one in Kant, universal === necessary). There are readings of Kant to go further and suggest that math, by extension, must be the descriptor of anything that can exist therefore. Interesting enough, the grandfather of the modern Left, Michel Foucault, spent a considerable amount of his career trying to dislodge Kant's claim before coming upon the realization that power informs our perceptions.
  • katttrrr 7y ago
    What a thoughtful response. I'd love to know which readings you'd suggest reading and in what order.
    • claudiawerner 7y ago
      Not the user you replied to, but there's no harm (and in my judgement great benefit) from diving right into Kant, or more generally, German idealism - so Kant, Fichte, Schelling and Hegel. Marx is also worth visiting for his "Hegelian" materialism (in this case opposed to idealism). That'll provide the basics to know what Foucault was talking about. The Cambridge Companion to German Idealism (I forget which year) is also highly recommended though I haven't looked into that myself.
      • jasperry 7y ago
        Also, to plug my own favorite dead German guy, Schopenhauer spends a lot of time in his writings explaining (his interpretation of) Kant's ideas, and his prose is much easier to understand than Kant's, even in translation. You won't get any love for Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel from him though.
        • claudiawerner 7y ago
          >You won't get any love for Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel from him though. You most certainly won't :)
      • ianleeclark 7y ago
        It should be noted that even Kant said that Hume "awoke me [kant] from my dogmatic slumber." Hume is pivotal to Kant's work, so at least reading the Enquiry is a good thing to read before Kant.
        • claudiawerner 7y ago
          While true, and I realize the irony of saying this since I mentioned building up to Foucault, I don't think one is harmed so much by simply starting. There's a lot of people who try to pile on more and more prerequisites and I think it's less productive; for every person who tells you to read Hume before Kant there are ten who will tell you to read Berkely before Hume. Personally I simply entered what interested me; first Marx (which is an ongoing love) then Hegel and now Kant. Heraclitus can come later.
    • barberousse 7y ago
      In order to understand Kant, first read David Hume's Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Kant's major ideas are entirely a response to this essay (we English-speakers are lucky to have this crucial piece of the Enlightenment in our native tongue). Hume argues that cause and effect are entirely empirical concepts, which has the implication that we can't actually talk about "eternal laws of nature" with any sense. Kant wrote The Critique of Pure Reason and his subsequent critiques in the trilogy to argue that the laws of nature are laws because they are the laws of our ability to experience subjectivity at all. The Critique is very dense and technically written and the English translations do little to abate this. I would recommend reading it with a companion commentary text though unfortunately that wasn't the path I'd taken so I can't pick out a specific one.
      • marktani 7y ago
        Did you mean to say in his native tongue? There are way more English-speakers than native English-speakers.
        • schoen 7y ago
          I think the person you're replying to meant to say "we native English speakers".
          • deleted 7y ago
            [deleted]
  • donclark 7y ago
    What about people that have a distaste for authority? Would this distrust dissolve how power informs our perceptions? Is there something in the transition period in the teenage years that also sets the foundation of perceptions? I ask because that is a time it seems where we take the most risks and question everything.
    • beat 7y ago
      Distrust of authority does not change the fact that power informs our perceptions. Imagine trying to have a conversation in a loud room. You struggle to hear the person you're conversing with. The loudness of the room informs your perception of the conversation. You might not enjoy the loud room, but it's nonetheless there. And your frustration with the loud room is probably affecting your responses to the conversation.
    • nostrademons 7y ago
      Disagreement is shaped as much by power as agreement, because in both cases you accept the framing of what gets discussed posed by the people in power. Truly claiming that power for yourself requires breaking out of the frame entirely and directing your attention where you want it. For example, public educators have near-absolute power over K-12 students in the U.S. Many students rebel against this (I certainly did), and do things like argue about homework or refuse to go to class. But that accepts the educators' power as legitimate; if it weren't, you wouldn't bother to rebel against it! Someone truly intent on seizing power for themselves would devote the minimum amount of effort and attention to pleasing his teachers, and then go off and write a machine-learning based MP3 player that he can go sell to Microsoft for a million dollars.
      • nybble41 7y ago
        > But that accepts the educators' power as legitimate; if it weren't, you wouldn't bother to rebel against it! On the contrary, it only accepts that their power exists. That is not the same as accepting its legitimacy. If you accepted their power as legitimate then you wouldn't be rebelling! The rebellion occurs because of the this discrepancy between what is and what ought to be, as the student perceives it.
  • Circuits 7y ago
    Is consciousness not just the summation of our rational? The summation of our analysis of the physical world? My thoughts immediately go too people who have had a lobotomy. Which is how I learned that the mind can create fictitious explanations of the world without the individual being aware that the explanations aren't grounded in reality.
• Analemma_ 7y ago
  > For this reason, the “what it’s like” to be a conscious mind can’t be described in the purely relational, dispositional terms accessible to science. There’s just no way to get there from here. Chalmers can keep saying this until he’s blue in the face, but it doesn’t make it true.
  • zepto 7y ago
    People can keep denying this until they are blue in the face but it doesn’t make it false.
    • blacksqr 7y ago
      The burden of proof rests on those asserting that something is true.
      • CharlesColeman 7y ago
        > The burden of proof rests on those asserting that something is true. That's nonsense. I'm sure you can re-write most if not all assertions that "something is false" as equivalent assertions that "something else is true," therefore the burden of proof rests equally on everyone asserting anything.
        • blacksqr 7y ago
          https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam%27s_razor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam%27s_razor
      • mcguire 7y ago
        So "the “what it’s like” to be a conscious mind can be described in the purely relational, dispositional terms accessible to science"? If you would be so kind...?
      • mellosouls 7y ago
        Prove it.
• xamuel 7y ago
  One assumption people often take for granted about consciousness is that everyone is conscious. I agree we should operate under that assumption for the purposes of making ethical decisions, but I think we should challenge it for the purpose of trying to understand consciousness better. What if philosophical zombies aren't just a hypothetical thought experiment, what if some people are conscious and others only pretend to be conscious? Is there some particular event that triggers consciousness? Lacan thought that consciousness is triggered by looking in a mirror (or something equivalent to a mirror). If someone was carefully raised without the ability to look in a mirror, see their own shadow, hear their own voice, etc., would they never become conscious? How could you tell? What if consciousness is triggered by something totally unexpected, like: circumcision; submersion baptism; chicken pox; or some particular bacteria in my gut? I can find someone who never had chicken pox and ask them if they're conscious, but how do I know if they're answering truthfully? Everyone has a big incentive to profess consciousness, because anyone who professed non-consciousness would be in danger of losing the privileges and protections which society grants to conscious people.
  • AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y ago
    In my opinion the only value in this idea is that it highlights the absurdity of trying to apply an empirical model on an un-empirical concept. Since "consciousness" can not be measured, and indeed is difficult to even define in words, it is excluded by any model which insists upon an objective reality. To your point: how do we know that all people posses consciousness? We don't. We make that assumption because other people are like us. The less like us something is, the less likely we are to assume it has consciousness. For most of human history animals were not afforded this assumption and that is only now starting to change because, as it turns out, animals are a lot more like us than we like to admit. In other words, it's speciesism. The whole discussion about what does and doesn't have conscious is a desperate attempt to justify human exceptionalism.
    • xamuel 7y ago
      >We make that assumption because other people are like us. Yes, and I think this is a mistake, because it shuts down any hope of isolating what it is about us that makes us conscious. Perhaps this will change as human-lookalike-robot technology gets better, breaking down the "looks like me, must be conscious like me" argument. People are starting to grant animals the rights of consciousness, but let me ask, what about sperm? I myself was sperm once, and over time I became a full-grown human being. If consciousness is a boolean, then at what exact moment did I become conscious? Was it when I reached the egg? When the first neuron in my brain formed? When my umbilical cord was severed? When I first recognized myself in a mirror [Lacan]?
• ph4 7y ago
  For those interested in potential viable ontologies other than reductive physicalism, I encourage you to read the works of Bernardo Kastrup. His most recent book, The Idea of the World, is well-argued and very interesting.
• drbojingle 7y ago
  Why are we Conscious? I think the answer, at a very high level, must be that evolution followed the path of least resistance: consciousness has high value per amount of energy expended on it and is easy to achieve.
• gnode 7y ago
  It seems to me that the properties of consciousness would naturally follow from any generally intelligent system. An intelligent agent must be aware of phenomena in its environment, it must be able to distinguish phenomena (qualia), its experience is subjective to the extent of the limitations of its connectivity. > The problem is that there could conceivably be brains that perform all the same sensory and decision-making functions as ours but in which there is no conscious experience. I think before this can be said to be a problem, it should be explained how such a brain (with human-like intelligence) can exist without mechanisms corresponding to the properties of consciousness.
  • codeulike 7y ago
    Yeah, Chinese Room Argument, and see Dennett's take on it edit: see my other comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20518623 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20518623
  • agitator 7y ago
    To me it seems obvious that any intelligent living thing that has some level of intelligence would be conscious... as in take in sensory data, is aware of it's environment, and can make decisions based on that. But I would even argue that most living things above a certain neuron count are conscious. I think it's really flawed to assume that only we as humans have an awareness of self and are "conscious". I don't see the distinction between my awareness of myself and my environment, and that of my dog for example. He is aware of himself, has ideas and acts on them, interacts with his world consciously. It's as if humans are grasping for some sort of uniqueness in nature. If you were a robot with sensors and cameras fed into a generally intelligent neural network. You wouldn't see a display of the data on a hud. You would be consciously immersed in the data. You would be the neural network. You would have an awareness of your environment, and you would be conscious of your existence in it. I think consciousness is evolutionary. It allows living things to want to survive and preserve what they are. I think without consciousness a creature wouldn't have the strong drive for survival. In my opinion, it's what makes you long to continue your existence.
    • jpttsn 7y ago
• manifestsilence 7y ago
  The only sane and productive model of consciousness I've encountered (and I've been around a bunch through growing up in the Transcendental Meditation movement) has been the one described in Hofstadter's works, such as Godel, Escher, Bach. He talks about consciousness as an epiphenomenon, where the pattern itself is what makes something conscious, rather than some magical property that some matter has and other matter doesn't. With mathematical precision, he describes how consciousness relates to the ability to self-reference and how this relates to fundamental paradoxes in various fields such as the Halting Problem, Godel's Incompleteness Theorems, Russel's Paradox, and the works of Escher and Bach. This line of thinking brings up some very interesting moral questions: What is it about life that makes us want to value it? Why do we have the notion of "higher" and "lower" life forms and value some species more highly than others? If we created a sufficiently advanced AI, that gave all the appearances of having feelings, a sense of self preservation, an identity, and desires, would it be immoral to unplug it or control its freedoms? What if it felt and understood even more than a human? Would its needs supersede our own? Anyway, I highly recommend that book, GEB. It has made most other philosophizing about consciousness seem flat to me.
  • k__ 7y ago
    I found "the ego tunnel" was nice.
    • manifestsilence 7y ago
      Thanks for the recommendation!
  • John_KZ 7y ago
    >What is it about life that makes us want to value it? That's an excellent question. All the questions about consciousness are probably an attempt to better understand (and avoid?) death. However I still have a hard time imagining a scenario where we can scientifically understand consciousness. Eventually we will understand all about how the mind works. All the various processes and how they lead to higher functions like thinking consciously in natural language etc. We'll be able to manipulate and alter our conscious experience. But even if there was a neural switch to turn consciousness on and off, we would still fail to convince ourselves of the physical nature of it, as we could never experience a state without consciousness. My personal belief is that although we are painfully physical, we will never explain why we're actually here, experiencing those calculations, or in fact being them. Being calculations of a meat sack. Why would this happen?
• syn0byte 7y ago
  We will be able to explain and understand consciousness in objective terms 1 second after the first person achieves flight by pulling themselves into the air with the bucket they are standing in. About 5 seconds after a computer can run a 100% simulation of itself running a 100% simulation of itself. A whole minute after someone writes a program that can tell if/when any other programs will stop running. As a question that's dogged us for thousands of years, maybe its time to accept its just a shitty question.
  • drclau 7y ago
    Nonsense. Consciousness is a matter of information processing. We're just biological computers running a program. The so called hard problem of consciousness is really just folklore by now. Neuroscience will eventually provide a complete explanation of consciousness. I'm frankly surprised we still think in magical terms about consciousness, in this time and age, knowing all we know about how the universe works, knowing how the brain works. Pragmatic philosophers, such as Thomas Metzinger, have already accepted the failure of philosophy in this regard, and support the neuroscience approach. I can refer you to Thomas Metzinger's book, "The Ego Tunnel: The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self". He went through great efforts to make it accessible to laypersons, such as myself. It's well worth the time. Side note, I got to Thomas Metzinger from Peter Watts' Firefall. He says something along the lines "Metzinger is THE man" (will try to find the exact text and come back with an edit at some point).
• louwrentius 7y ago
  How is it that an article that basically describes the concept of qualia never once mention the word? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualia
  • zamalek 7y ago
    It doesn't exactly. I think this quote really clarifies what the article is trying to discuss: > While physical properties cannot explain consciousness, consciousness is needed to explain physical properties. If consciousness is (and, yes, qualia are) how we perceive reality, how can we define consciousness based on observation? It would be like trying to use a telescope to capture an image of itself. If "consciousness comes first" that means that consciousness contains reality, not visa-versa.
    • naasking 7y ago
      > It would be like trying to use a telescope to capture an image of itself. Which you can do with the equivalent of a mirror. So assuming your analogy holds, then we just need to discover the equivalent of a consciousness mirror. As for the article itself: > While physical properties cannot explain consciousness, consciousness is needed to explain physical properties. This is conjecture. There is literally no proof that physical properties cannot explain consciousness, nor is there proof that consciousness is needed to explain physical properties.
• blacksqr 7y ago
  >The issue is that physical properties are by their nature relational, dispositional properties. That is, they describe the way that something is related to other things Author neglects to mention that this may apply to everything except the universe itself. >Something in the universe has to have some kind of quality in and of itself to give all the other relational/dispositional properties any meaning. Something has to get the ball rolling. The "something" may be the universe, i.e. its total wave function. Occam's Razor suggests looking for simple explanations rather than assuming the existence of things not detectable. Could the universe itself be conscious? Making such a claim would seem to make the author's argument a tautology.
  • o_nate 7y ago
    That's an interesting idea though it's hard to see how it would work in practice. In practice, our scientific concepts are ultimately grounded in observational data, data accessible to a conscious observer. I don't see how scientific concepts could be restated in terms of the universe as a whole, especially when one considers we only have very indefinite information about the ultimate characteristics of it.
    • blacksqr 7y ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_wavefunction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_wavefunction
• buboard 7y ago
  The hard problem will be a very hard even after it has been solved. Philosophers dont even want it solved, they just like to discuss it.
  • Anon84 7y ago
    As with any other philosophical problem. Discussing it is the point.
    • buboard 7y ago
      The hard problem is leaking dangerously into the real world though. Chalmers' original paper posited consciousness as a physical quantity, which presumably could be empirically studied.
      • naasking 7y ago
        I don't think so, because to Chalmers it's an epiphenomenon, and so has no influence on the outside world. Only our minds experience consciousness, but as an epiphenomenon it doesn't influence our behaviour one bit, so to Chalmers, we might actually not even have consciousness and are simply deluded in thinking we do. Exclamations of "but I know I'm conscious!" would mirror exactly those of a p-zombie who wasn't conscious.
        • buboard 7y ago
          Chalmers' consciousness is not an epiphenomenon, it s an entity of its own, but not part of the physical world > I suggest that a theory of consciousness should take experience as fundamental. We know that a theory of consciousness requires the addition of something fundamental to our ontology, as everything in physical theory is compatible with the absence of consciousness. We might add some entirely new nonphysical feature, from which experience can be derived, but it is hard to see what such a feature would be like. More likely, we will take experience itself as a fundamental feature of the world, alongside mass, charge, and space-time. If we take experience as fundamental, then we can go about the business of constructing a theory of experience. The problem that most physicalists see is that this introduces an entity seemingly needlessly, which breaks occam's razor.
• sgt101 7y ago
  I wonder why we believe that the evolution that has equiped us to be conscious and to wonder about consciousness (which I think is probably part of the deal of consciousness) has provided us with minds and languages that can understand or discuss it? In fact, it seems quite likely that being able to understand consciousness has no evolutionary value at all!
• Animats 7y ago
  The real answer is that we don't yet know enough about how the brain works to work effectively on this problem. We don't know what questions to ask or how to break down the problem into smaller problems. We may get there. Read something about how vision works from a century ago, when nobody had a clue. The first real progress came from "What the Frog's Eye Tells the Frog's Brain" (1959).[1] That was the beginning of understanding visual perception, and the very early days of neural network technology. Now we have lots of systems doing visual perception moderately well. There's been real progress. (I went through Stanford CS at the peak of the 1980s expert system boom. Back then, people there were way too much into asking questions like this. "Does a rock have intentions?" was an exam question. The "AI winter" followed. AI finally got unstuck 20 years later when the machine learning people and their "shut up and calculate" approach started working.) [1] https://hearingbrain.org/docs/letvin_ieee_1959.pdf https://hearingbrain.org/docs/letvin_ieee_1959.pdf
  • dqpb 7y ago
    Completely untrue. Read Consciousnes and the Brain by Stanislas Dehaene. There is plenty of research and progress in this area.
    • eanzenberg 7y ago
      Eh, this still doesn't go beyond the fundamental "I think therefore I am." I can prove to myself that I have consciousness, but for everyone else, ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
      • dqpb 7y ago
        Nope. Read the book. There is even an Audible version if you'd rather listen to it.
      • gashaw 7y ago
        You can't prove even that. If you examine it closely, the argumnent only proves that "it" thinks. "It" is not necessarily an "I", for what restricts the thinking to an I (i.e a part of reality)? It could be the whole reality that does the thinking as far as the argument goes. Sorry.
• Symmetry 7y ago
  The problem is that there could conceivably be brains that perform all the same sensory and decision-making functions as ours but in which there is no conscious experience. That's really not true. In Neural Correlates of Consciousness research there are two very important things people can only do for experiences that they're consciously aware of: remember then and communicate about them. Someone with blindsight can pick up and apple in front of them as well as a sighted person. But give them a blindfold and they won't be able to reach for the spot their eyes once knew the apple was located in. And they can't tell anyone what is in front of them either.
  • TimTheTinker 7y ago
    The examples you give are of brains for which there is conscious experience, at least in some areas. For an existing consciousness-capable brain to have some capabilities that are both unconscious and memory-inaccessible does not disprove the potential existence of fully-functional, non-conscious brains. Although I'd agree that otherwise functional non-conscious brains would probably be unable to communicate coherently about personal experiences/thoughts/memories/etc.
  • afro88 7y ago
    That's just memory isn't it? A raspberry pi can learn the position of a thing with a camera and then control a mechanical arm to reach that thing with the camera switched off.
  • naasking 7y ago
    > But give them a blindfold and they won't be able to reach for the spot their eyes once knew the apple was located in. And they can't tell anyone what is in front of them either. There's no reason this functional behaviour requires the subjective quality of conscious experience. The recorded movement of a robotic arm doesn't, and it can replicate this feat, for example.
• ilovecaching 7y ago
  Just a summary of Wittgenstein's Tractatus
• viach 7y ago
  Is there a formal language in philosophy? So that one can define the input formulas (axioms) and with some kind of "philosophy math" calculate things like "what is the meaning of life and everything" and "what is consciousness"? Otherwise for me it all looks like words juggling continuing for many centuries. They really should implement a programming language for philosophy and outsource the hard parts to Ukraine.
  • dmreedy 7y ago
    There is indeed. It's called Formal Logic, and the broad class of philosophers who have attempted that program you describe are usually referred to as "Analytic Philosophers". They haven't made a ton of progress (I mean that as a statement of fact, not disrespect), and tend to tackle much more primitive, foundational problems than what the Continental philosophers like to deal in ("what is the meaning of everything" and all that). Turns out it's a pretty hard problem to even pin down exactly what a word means, or what a name is, much less what the meaning of everything is. The trick is, those questions are the axioms. And so the act of asserting them is a philosophical act in and of themselves. The rest is just moving stones around.
    • viach 7y ago
      Thanks for clarifying things to me, I didn't even know the "Analytic Philosophers" term exists. > They haven't made a ton of progress But they progress is what should be provable and repeatable, like the real science requires? So probably, this kind of progress is the only real one in the field?
      • dmreedy 7y ago
        Absolutely, but that's not the interesting part. The problem boils down to the fact that any kind of formal proof system is only "truth-preserving machinery"; that is, you can't get out something "truer" than what you put in. It doesn't introduce new truths into the world, it just permutes existing ones so that different facets of them are clear. But when you're trying ask big questions about the nature of truth itself, a proof doesn't get you very far! You're trying to get at the thing that has to be assumed as a prior or axiom in order for the proof machinery to do what it does. Given our current understanding of the universe, a proof in any formal system can never tell you "why" the thing that it proved was true. Just how it got there.
• Grimm1 7y ago
  This article begs the question of our conciousness not being a physical process which is cool I guess If your peddling thoughts from a dualist from over a century ago. I still have no reason however, not to believe our conciousness doesn't arise from the physical configuration and other processes therein related. To paraphrase "Science cant talk about this purely in physic terms." No, Science simply hasn't FOUND the way to talk about it in physical terms which I personally believe in time we will. To be absolutely fair, as you may have noticed I'm in the camp of people who think Kant is largely garbage so I'm have a natural bias against works using his thought on the matter.
  • paulddraper 7y ago
    Science hasn't found or even begin to find a way to talk about this. It's not like a physicist looking at an amoeba. That's a very complicated physical system, but it seems obvious that each of the parts can be progressively broken down into the fundamental physical forces and particles. Consciousness....we can't even begin to talk about that in a fundamental physical way. The operation of the brain? Sure. But as far as we know, you could have an otherwise identical brain/computer firing circuits, producing actions, etc without consciousness. Which gets to the heart of the issue: we have no way to observe consciousness outside our own.
    • greiskul 7y ago
      > But as far as we know, you could have an otherwise identical brain/computer firing circuits, producing actions, etc without consciousness. We don't know that at all. Can you describe how that would be like? Would a person with no consciousness not talk about their own consciousness? But talking about the self is an action. It seems pretty clear that the reason brains talk about their consciousness is their consciousness.
      • throwanem 7y ago
        Nothing of the sort is clear. If you train a GPT-2 instance on a corpus of the philosophy of consciousness which has been rewritten into the first-person singular, and you then ask it a question which it answers with a discourse on "my consciousness", is it conscious? Your argument here says that it is. You're assuming without evidence that consciousness is, and is only, an epiphenomenon of a sufficiently complex neural net, which you are of course welcome to do. But attempting to cloak that assumption in positive language, as you do here and elsewhere, is a bit of linguistic chicanery that doesn't deserve to pass entirely without comment.
• eternalny1 7y ago
  I went through the whole indoctrinated-religious, "devout" atheist, "scientific" agnostic, and now I guess I'm a theist. Why? Because I read a book on consciousness that came like a bolt out of the blue and I understood that we do not understand. I don't buy this "emergent property of the mind" thing because while I understand evolutionary theory I am not sure how you bridge that gap to subjective experience. I have absolutely no clue what this "god" is that I accepted, but I know I'm not going to be punished for leaving this comment. EDIT: just read the comments. I've been to BNL and CERN.
  • xamuel 7y ago
    "The wind blows where it wishes. You hear its sound, but you do not know where it comes from or where it is going. So it is with everyone born of the Spirit." (John 3:8)
  • byproxy 7y ago
    Which book did you read?
    • eternalny1 7y ago
      I think it may have been Fire in the Mind by Johnson although Paul Davies pushed me along.
  • jhedwards 7y ago
    What part of subjective experience exactly do you think that evolutionary theory fails to explain? I study evolution quite a bit and, while there are many details about behavior and learning that are still missing, AFAICT it seems to explain consciousness and subjectivity pretty well.
    • eternalny1 7y ago
      > What part of subjective experience exactly do you think that evolutionary theory fails to explain? Consciousness. We could and should be robots. There is nothing to reproducing that requires this, which is the survival of the fittest. Brain teaser: Take absolute nothingness (not the "void" of space, true nothing) then have that create something that allows me to reply to you on HN.
• ilaksh 7y ago
  Christof Koch on consciousness https://youtu.be/piHkfmeU7Wo https://youtu.be/piHkfmeU7Wo
• ilaksh 7y ago
  This "problem" is mainly a symptom of religious worldviews that are still holding out deep inside some heads.
• meroes 7y ago
  Sure maybe from a philosophical point of argument consciousness trumps all and physical existence and objective external reality should be viewed through that lense. But every single particle has a worldline tracing back to the Big Bang, where there were no conscious beings present yet. Only until the universe cooled and became less dense did consciousness become possible. So can consciousness really claim supremacy over external reality. To do so would require retroactivity or bootstrapping. Unless you accept the idea of a timeless universe where no point on a worldline (or collection of worldlines) is privileged, and now is a statistical reality more than anything in that there are more collections of worldlines with consciousnesses when the universe is relatively evenly made up of dark energy and regular matter+energy (highest amount observers compared to much closer or much further from Big Bang). The flow of time may be a subjective illusion.
  • lorenzsell 7y ago
    Conscious beings not being present does not mean that consciousness is not. This article basically asserts that your cognition of yourself as "conscious of the world" (as you imply here) may be inverted. The big bang may actually be the birth of consciousness, which we, as human beings, are gradually becoming more conscious of.
    • meroes 7y ago
      I took issue with this part: >In the same way, if the universe is to actually exist, its properties can’t be exclusively relational/dispositional People who believe the mathematical universe hypothesis would take issue here (I'm not educated enough to make a full opinion but I know they would oppose this quote). They would say the universe is entirely relational - it's all one set of mathematical relations. Max Tegmark is one such person and he explains consciousness and self awareness as arising out of evolution (being aware and not a slave to sensory inputs can be beneficial), and subjective reality and the flow of time are just subjective/conscious illusions. Albeit he doesn't give a mechanism for consciousness to form in the brain, but no one has yet.
    • driverdan 7y ago
      There is absolutely no evidence to support that claim, nor is there any plausible reason to believe it.
• youdontknowtho 7y ago
  I still don't understand what people mean when they say something like "Rather than trying to reduce consciousness to fit into the box of relational/dispositional properties, it is time that we begin to explore it for what it is—and for the answers that studying it on its own terms, in its full splendor and variety, stands to provide." What are you supposed to do with that? What does recognizing the ontological primacy of consciousness actually entail? A lot of this sounds like the kind of "center of what's known" fallacies that plagued human thought in the pre-scientific era. The sun isn't central to anything, the Earth isn't central to anything, human consciousness is probably not central to anything either. Why wouldn't that pattern hold here. Why wouldn't we just be wrong about how unique consciousness is?
• chaoticmass 7y ago
  I've wondered this myself-- what if instead of the brain growing the create consciousness, it grows to receive consciousness? Like a tree growing to receive light.
  • deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
• baron_harkonnen 7y ago
  The most interesting view of consciousness that really changed my thoughts on it was from Wegner's "The Illusion of Conscious Will". He basically argues this: We have an agent-based model to understand the behavior of certain things in the world. When we see a cat chase a mouse we assume that the cat as an agent which has a goal which is to catch the mouse. That is we imagine the intentions of the cat (and the mouse) to better predict what will happen next. This is just a mental model, but it's different than the causal model we use to predict where a baseball will land when you throw it. We apply this model to all sorts of things because it is useful to help predict behavior. That is we imagine conscious intention as a tool to understand things in our world. The catch is that when we observer our own mind at work... we apply this same model. This is a weird moment where we try to imagine that we have conscious intentions, but since it is own on selves we are watching this creates the illusion of conscious will. Whether or not Wegner really nails it, I become increasingly suspicious that consciousness is far less special and much more of a trick than we believe it is. But because that illusion is tied to who we "are" we have a very hard time letting go (of course this idea goes back to Buddha and earlier)
  • jonnycomputer 7y ago
    Can you not have consciousness without free will?
• Lowkeyloki 7y ago
  I don't know if this "problem" can ever truly be "solved" as there's not really a way to prove there to be a difference between something truly "feeling" emotions compared to faking it convincingly. I have to wonder at what point the difference becomes moot, a sort of Chinese room for emotions. I tend to lean towards solipsism when it comes to this kind of stuff, though. Does the difference actually matter?
  • ambrop7 7y ago
    I could argue that even people who genuinely feel emotions have, unconsciously, learned to feel them through their interactions with other people. Who can prove to me that emotions are something fundamental to humans and not acquired through culture? In a sense, everyone may as well be faking it.
    • Lowkeyloki 7y ago
      So you're positing that emotions are a cultural virus.
• msiyer 7y ago
  The building blocks of this universe are "things" vibrating. That is all I know. Consciousness is a very tricky problem. I often question what happens when a man loses his "mind". Is the being now just a machine with stored memory which responds to stimuli? What happens when a person loses his memory? What role does consciousness play in this scenario? How do we let split personality disorder and consciousness to play together? Also, I look around and see the geometry of flowers and seeds. Geometry that emanates from the universe. Everything that looks chaotic at one level becomes extremely beautiful and organized at another. Also, I see that everything is terribly interconnected. If we think deeply enough we can easily see that a stone lying outside and us are all the same as far as building blocks are concerned. The stone is not an unnecessary object, but our existence and the stone's existence are inextricable. The universe, whatever is visible to me, is absolutely too grand and too well engineered to not have some sort of intelligence working behind it. I do not know.
  • agitator 7y ago
    You could just tie it all back to physics. Not much intelligent about gravity coalescing matter. But that had the side effect of releasing atomic energy in the form of stars. The rubble attracted by these stars, orbited till it coalesced itself into planets. Those planets are bombarded by atomic energy by stars. Chemical reactions happened to break down this energy. Life, aka chemical reactions that are able to persist, started happening as a side effect. The more robust and more intelligent reactions were able to persist through fluctuations in environment. ie. ice ages, meteors, etc. We are nothing more than a persistent, stubborn reaction. A fungus on a hot rock. Maybe someday we can send some spores to another hot rock, and continue our fungal infestation. Provided that we don't consume all the resources here before that happens and fizzle out. In any case, I'm sure there is a fungus, perhaps a more evolved one, somewhere else in the universe that will.
    • wppick 7y ago
      The brain is connected to the gut via the vagus nerve. It's possible that humans are just a vehicle for bacteria to more quickly and interact with their environment in a more substantial way in a similar way that human use cars as a vehicle. I feel like I am an individual with my own consciousness, but it's possible it is all one shared consciousness by a super network of bacteria
• glitchc 7y ago
  What if it doesn’t? There, see how easy that was?
• d1zzy 7y ago
  I think the problem is looked at in a confusing way. On one hand, we use a scientific/empiric analysis of the success of science to explain consciousness on the other we are ready to admit science may not be able to explain it but we don't apply the same rigorous mechanism to test the non-scientific explanation of it. I also think we are not seeing the forest from the trees and are too hooked up to some kind of "magic explanation" of consciousness that is defined by having people explain their experience. I'm a strong proponent of the "what acts like a duck is a duck" principle. If in the future we manage to create machines which will be, for a very large statistical value, indistinguishable from a human in terms of behavior (that is, make the Turing test seem like a childish joke), is it fair then to say that those are just machines made to emulate our behavior and don't really reflect "real" consciousness? Why is it fair to define consciousness just as something that humans and personal human experience can decide? Yes, machines may never have human consciousness, but if for all intends and purposes they behave as having one, then they have one, in my opinion. Also, saying that humans are more than biochemical machines is the same like saying that my home gaming PC is more than wires and electrons. Yes, the experience enabled by the software running on those wires and electrons goes beyond just the physical support for it but that doesn't mean, that at the end of the day it isn't just wires and electrons.
• agitator 7y ago
  Hold up, Is this thread being inundated by a religious group or something? Where is the rational thought behind this consciousness discussion? If all of you "critical thinkers" are really responding with "You just don't want to accept that consciousness can't be explained with science" then I have lost my last remaining bit of hope in humanity's intelligence.
  • jonny_eh 7y ago
    Right, it's the classic "God of the gaps". People invested in some kind of faith latch onto areas not yet explained by science. This relies on the false belief that if something isn't explained by science, then there's an opportunity for faith to provide value (aka faith is needed to provide an explanation). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God_of_the_gaps https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God_of_the_gaps
    • deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
    • prmph 7y ago
      But the many worlds interpretation is also a sort of gap-plugging, unfalsifiable argument to me. With it, no need to actually explain why the universe is one way or another: all the possibilities exist in different worlds. I think people delude themselves that science, at least as currently practised, is always objective.
  • Balgair 7y ago
    I'm also a bit confused here. It seems that a lot of the commentors here have either not read the article posted at all, or are intentionally trying to manipulate the HN comments so as to confound any future ML algos with what amounts to jibberish and noise. There seems to be an inordinate amount of people talking past each other and calling each other names (or something similarly in bad faith). I may just be tricking myself though and seeing things that are not out of place in any other thread.
  • buboard 7y ago
    Philosophers of mind still insist on metaphysical descriptions of consciousness Eventhough there is so much progress in neuroscience that makes it hard to take it seriously anymore. Afaik, most young neuroscientists abstain from these endlessly-goal-shifting discussions. Its a pity too because with recent progress in deep learning there couldnt be a more exciting time to do mind philosophy (You should have realized that HN has been infiltrated a long time ago)
• tim333 7y ago
  >the question of why we have conscious experience at all. Maybe because being conscious rather than say knocked unconscious is an advantage for survival and reproduction? While that is semi joking, consciousness quite likely arose as a functional, being aware of what's going on, thing with qualia (what it feels like) a kind of side effect.
• lone_haxx0r 7y ago
  > The problem is that there could conceivably be brains that perform all the same sensory and decision-making functions as ours but in which there is no conscious experience. That is, there could be brains that react as though sad but that don’t feel sadness, brains that can discriminate between wavelengths of light but that don’t see red or yellow or blue or any other color, brains that direct their bodies to eat certain foods but that don’t taste them. So why is there nevertheless something that it’s like to be us? I don't think so. What even is this "conscious experience"? I hypothesize that it's an illusion. A sufficiently complex robot would indeed have the same "conscious experience". Qualia is nothing more than complex arrangements of molecules in our brains, it's an abstraction, not something fundamental to the universe. Maybe stars and planets too have some sort of rudimentary "conscious experience". I can't prove this, but you can't prove that you have "conscious experience" either. > that no physical property or set of properties can explain what it’s like to be conscious. I think that it can be explained but we just don't have enough knowledge of the internal workings of the brain yet. For some reason I get really exalted when people such as the author disagree with me on this, of all topics. I don't know what it is, maybe it makes me angry that people don't realize it. I know that sounds really arrogant (specially when author has a phd in philosophy), and I might be wrong and look like an idiot, but I can't control this feeling. I feel the same way a teenage atheist feels when he hears a religious person speak about god (I know this because I was that teenage atheist).
  • ambrop7 7y ago
    If a brain performs the same sensory and decision-making functions, it is also going to claim that it feels emotions and experiences colors in particular ways. For all practical purpose, such a brain is conscious.
• mikekchar 7y ago
  I can answer a little bit of the question. Why do rotten eggs smell like rotten eggs and not roses? The answer is: it's actually arbitrary. In my 20s I broke my leg fairly badly. It damaged the nerve, but luckily left the sheath of the nerve undamaged. The end result was that half my foot was paralysed. What I never realised is that if the nerve sheath is undamaged, the nerve will regrow! So slowly over time I started to get feeling back in my foot. I don't know exactly what goes on, but I'd get this sharp shooting pain, like a needle in my foot and slowly after each time, I'd regain a little bit of feeling (I don't know... is that just the nerve endings "reattaching"???) Eventually, I got pretty much all the feeling back... except it wasn't mapped properly. The space between my toes felt like the sole of my foot and various other strangeness. Slowly I got used to it. A few years later, my brain had completely translated everything and the space between my toes felt like the space between my toes. Even though I know it's mapped differently I can't consciously distinguish between the feelings I have now and the feelings before I broke my leg. So a rose smells like a rose because the receptors that are activated when you smell a rose are different from the receptors that are activated when you smell a rotten egg. It's just like the nerve endings between my toes are different than the nerve endings on the sole of my foot. But it's just input for your brain, nothing more. Of course we have an aversion to the smell of rotten eggs, but that's just hard wired -- more input for the brain. There are lots of people who have aversion to smells that other people like. In terms of "consciousness", I think it's likely an illusion of sorts. We experience a kind of continuum of consciousness. In reality, though, there is only an instant. Our awareness is an artefact of our memory. Behaviour couldn't exist without a feedback loop. For those of us who are programmers, this is pretty obvious. In order to have a state machine, the new output needs to not only look at new input, but also its current state. Every instant we exist we are processing new input and also our current state (which seems to prioritise recent inputs). We exist instantaneously, but because we are processing previous data along with new data, it creates an illusion of having existed over a continuum. Additionally, the only reason we have an ego is simply because our data networks are isolated. If I could access the data of another brain in the same way I can access data in my own brain, there would be no way to distinguish between the "two of us". There would be no way to distinguish between "my thoughts" and "somebody else's thoughts". "I" would not exist... or rather "I" would be the "two of us". It's just an artificial distinction based on a lack of ability to access the data. Or at least that's the way I look at it. There is no way to know for sure. It might just be the FSM manipulating me like a puppet.
• flipcoder 7y ago
  I've also heard that it could be that everything that exists, is "potentially conscious", such that if it is connected in such a way where it can experience and actuate, it can become aware of it's own essence, and that consciousness is just the first person experience of the universe itself. That idea is interesting but it doesn't quite solve anything, since the harder problem is figuring out exactly how the brain awakens it.
• Causality1 7y ago
  >The problem is that there could conceivably be brains that perform all the same sensory and decision-making functions as ours but in which there is no conscious experience. That is, there could be brains that react as though sad but that don’t feel sadness, brains that can discriminate between wavelengths of light but that don’t see red or yellow or blue That's an assertion I believe to not be so obvious it can be assumed to be correct with no argument to the contrary. If you can't define consciousness why do you believe it exists independent of these other systems and that these other systems exist independent of it? The study of consciousness is absolutely full of non-falsifiable claims like this. We decide apes and dogs and frogs and ants are not sapient but that is an outside observation. It may be as erroneous as looking at Specimen A and its great to the five hundredth generation ancestor and deciding that because they should count as two separate species there must have been some momentous leap in the middle to make Specimen A possible. Consciousness could easily be a smooth spectrum from human to insect and we wouldn't know it because everything next to our level is extinct.
• zarmin 7y ago
  See also: Dean Radin
• gashaw 7y ago
  I think consciousness is one of those things that is not defined well enough for us to understand it. Until there is a breakthrough in the understanding of consciousness itself there won't be any real conscious ai. It's like when we learned to fly, we needn't understand how birds' wings work. We had to understand the principles of aerodynamics or what is flying itself. That's why I think imitating the brain won't work, (deep learning etc.) just like the early attempts to fly didn't, even if we'll know the function of every single neuron.
• visarga 7y ago
  Sorry to be so direct, but I have to say it like this otherwise it doesn't get through. Consciousness is that which makes us go take something to eat in the morning so we don't die of hunger, keeps us from running into cars or falling off a high place, allows us to work and be intelligent in our actions so that we cover our needs, guides us to form relations and make babies (thus replicate consciousness further). I think we are agents with the purpose of survival and reproduction. That is only possible by adaptation to the environment, including society and nature. While we're busy at keeping ourselves alive, we have to act intelligently and learn from our mistakes. There is nothing outside the realm of physics and nature, just plain old agent+environment+learning+self-replication. It feels like something to see blue (or to be a bat) because it is linked to survival, because we have senses and brains to create models of the world, because we have positive and negative signals (rewards) that guide our present and future actions and the value we attach to all life situations, and ultimately because life depends on it and self-replication would eliminate inefficient agents and leave those who are fit. In short, consciousness is an adaptation mechanism in service of self replication in an environment with limited resources and competition. I think all this dualist incredulity towards science is bullshit. Instead, the evolutionary process and the reinforcement learning process are sufficient to explain it. If we want to learn about consciousness we should not look only at the brain but at the environment and its limitations. It is the environment that shaped consciousness into existence. I know it's not as poetic as souls and hard-problems, but it is the simplest explanation that fits.
  • bollockitis 7y ago
    That's very well said. Consciousness isn't a "thing" to be discovered, it's a process. It's only visible when a variety of "things" are functioning in harmony. It's like asking which guitar string plays the G chord. It's _all_ of them and only when in tune.
  • attilakun 7y ago
    Many people would reject your definition of consciousness. You can easily imagine a universe where agents perform all the activities you listed, but without an experiential flavour to them. It would all be an "empty" process, much like a simulation in software except with more complex rules. Yet our universe seems nothing like this. There is an experiential flavour to it which everyone has access to from a first person perspective.
• edoloughlin 7y ago
  Maybe I'm just dumb, but I have a problem taking anything meaningful from that article. There's an ontological problem in defining consciousness in terms of observations - this is circular because we don't have a meaningful starting point so we should throw it all away and... then what?
• newsreview1 7y ago
  I may get pooh poohed here, but to me, this discussion is one of a spiritual nature. My belief is that God created all things spiritually first, before he created them physically. And, God is what gives all life it's sentience. Understanding the brain is only part f the equation. The soul of man (and woman) is both the physical body (including the brain) and the spirit. Until we can fully grasp the spiritual, we will never be able to make the "leap" between paper and conscience. Anyone else feel this way?
  • kartan 7y ago
    If the spirit interacts with the brain, then a spirit is a phisical thing that can be measured and is in the realm of science. If the spirit does not interact with the brain, then its existence does not have any effect and it is irrelevant to understand consciousness.
• cestith 7y ago
  Does consciousness itself suffer from intractability similar to Gödel's incompleteness theorems? Is there a consistent set of axioms that can even include all the truths about what we mean when we say "consciousness"? If so, can we go further and use consciousness to actually fully enumerate all the interactions necessary for it or all the implications of it from within a conscious system?
• DennisP 7y ago
  Bernardo Kastrup has written some compelling books arguing that idealism is more rational and skeptical than materialism. The best introduction is probably Why Materialism Is Baloney. A more academic version, consisting mostly of peer-reviewed papers, is The Idea of the World.
• sandinmytea 7y ago
  If so, this would be backed by a great many ancient sources on this topic. If so, it also creates great need to ponder how consciousness(es) are made to respond to their effects on others. If consciousness IS as wisdom traditions state, also what is needed is not empiricism, but plain commitment to respecting each other. After all, saying "okay - if I exist regardless, what gives?" Others do too, and might also some reason or actual thing which makes this possible - and to honor that possibility is actually to behave safer, have more pleasant dealings, and ultimately concern ourselves with best practices in getting the most of what we get in addition to our bare consciousness. If it can exist without any particular structure, it can be placed in other circumstances less desireable. I.e. every cultural tradition regarding virtue and karma, and G-d. I see evidence that the scientifically minded would be thrilled to know the makings of this, even if it would be n=1 revelation. I feel like the traditions given us are sensibly concerned with preserving awareness of these lately-arriving observations of upper dimensional/physics-derived approximations of how our selves are maintained in this projection by [previously unseen/ allegorically hinted in tradition] structures which are indeed real. yadda yadda.. the wisest people always say this, and they themselves often got there the hard way, and yet report good and thankful circumstances from choosing respectful behavior. So its somewhat able to be "controlled-for." The least-empirical and most curious, agenda-less, all say: do right, there is a supporting element that deserves respect, and since we do exist "hereafter" by some model in many different ways, its always worth not EXCLUDING this. If we ARE, then what currently we are is only a portion. That creates curiosity and investigation - I do it. I discover what I didn't expect. Now I hope others do, and do better at getting this idea to those who refuse its possibility. If so - if we are - that is to say, we exist regardless - it also means there's much to concern regarding not combating factors that will otherwise never preserve us. Instead, preserving mutual respect is greatest beneath whatever preserves all - because there would be no way free of the "other" if forever allowed for any result.
• basicplus2 7y ago
  What if self awareness comes first?
• sklivvz1971 7y ago
  What a useless article. Consciousness is not an impossible problem. It only becomes absurd if it's tinted of mysticism and dipped into a half-digested understanding of the current scientific consensus. First, let's demystify conscience. Scientifically, there's no soul - it's a religious concept that has no meaning outside of it. What's left of conscience is its shell, its interface. If we can model something that behaves like conscience, well, we created a genuine conscience. There are two sides to the shell of conscience. One is the outer shell: the problem is to build something that appears to be conscient. This is a reasonably hard CS or neurobiology problem but by no means impossible. We are getting reasonably close to generating seemingly conscious automata. Surely it's possible to see specific parts of the brain connected to this function: for example, the speech center, and so on. So: hard to do, but doable. The other part is the inner shell, or "self-conscience." This has to do with perception, mostly, and abstraction. We have already created expert systems that can perceive and give meaning to a lot of inputs. The trick is creating a system that can perceive itself, its state like it sees the world. This will require a general AI or strong AI, which is currently believed by many experts to be possible although super hard to do. Again though, this is a CS problem, it's addressable by science, and I have no doubt it's a matter of time until we can settle it. A machine with both characteristics would be just as alive as you or me. It would perceive the world semantically. It would understand to be conscious, and we would recognize it to be conscious too. At that point, the question of consciousness will become once more only attractive to philosophers and priests. The rest of us will have less problem accepting one of these machines as "alive and conscious."
• crazygringo 7y ago
  For anyone curious for more, the article surprisingly doesn't bother to mention the philosophical name given to this view: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idealism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idealism > "In philosophy, idealism is the group of metaphysical philosophies that assert that reality, or reality as humans can know it, is fundamentally mental, mentally constructed, or otherwise immaterial. Epistemologically, idealism manifests as a skepticism about the possibility of knowing any mind-independent thing. In contrast to materialism, idealism asserts the primacy of consciousness as the origin and prerequisite of material phenomena. According to this view, consciousness exists before and is the pre-condition of material existence. Consciousness creates and determines the material and not vice versa."
• hcarvalhoalves 7y ago
  I've recently watched this talk titled "Your brain hallucinates your conscious reality" [1] by Anil Seth, seems relevant to the topic. If you are intrigued by the question of the original article you might like the TED talk. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lyu7v7nWzfo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lyu7v7nWzfo
• eblanshey 7y ago
  The idea that consciousness comes first has been known as in eastern philosophy as non-dualism (advaita vedanta) -- everything is consciousness. The basic idea is that it is impossible to experience anything outside of our consciousness--thus any assumption there is something outside of consciousness is just that -- an assumption or belief. We can theorize, we can argue, but it will always remain a belief, because it's not possible to experience anything outside of consciousness. I'd like to share Rupert Spira, a modern non-dualist teacher that holds this view-point. Here is one video in which he explains the consciousness-first approach to someone, a scientist, who holds to the materialist approach: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qgcfa0LFKXc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qgcfa0LFKXc Perhaps someone will find it interesting and peruse some of his other videos, which I find very enlightening.
  • lioeters 7y ago
    I think the controversy of consciousness arises from (and is deeply tied to) the history of Western philosophy and science: the "death of God", matter/spirit and mind/body duality. Something that's not widely acknowledged is how Indian philosophy (Hindu, Buddhist) had significant influence in the course of that history. A major assumption of the currently dominant worldview is that there's no God, spirit, and even "mind" is questionable. Everything must be explainable as physics, and layers above like mechanics, chemistry, biology. Psychology as a field - in the "West", which is basically a global culture now - is based on that assumption. The word "consciousness" is so ill-defined and the concept so misunderstood, mainly because it's mixed up with ideas of free will, mind, spirit - the animating principle. It's just the most modern term for categorizing and trying to understand a class of phenomena. Seeing how "consciousness studies" is widely considered a pseudo-science, I suspect that it's actually related to some critical "flaw" in the fundamentals of the modern worldview, the assumption of a completely physical universe - "physical" meaning consistent with the science of physics. What's fascinating for me is how quantum mechanics and its philosophical speculations about the role of the observer seems to be causing a paradigm shift, which is taking decades (almost a century) to sink in. We seem to be redefining consciousness as a fundamental property of physics, with some even theorizing that consciousness plays a role in bringing the universe into existence. As a fan of both Indian philosophy and Western science, I'm greatly enjoying the battle of the ideas (often heated arguments and accusations of "woowoo" pseudo-scientific thinking), the struggle to understand the nature of consciousness deeply and rigorously, and the evolution of science and our worldviews.
• LordHumungous 7y ago
  > there could conceivably be brains that perform all the same sensory and decision-making functions as ours but in which there is no conscious experience. That makes no sense to me. What is consciousness but a mechanism for making decisions? A brain that has all of our decision making functions would be conscious by definition.
• chiefalchemist 7y ago
  > "...brains that can discriminate between wavelengths of light but that don’t see red or yellow or blue or any other color..." Well. I operate under the idea that we can only perceive three colors. Everything else is based on the brain's interpretation of that input. That is, for example, we don't see purple, the brain invents purple. That aside, simply put, reality is a consensus. And it exists collectiveky for those who buy into that agreement.
• artur_makly 7y ago
  Dreams —- to me pose as the lowest hanging fruit to peeling the viscous mutable layers of ...our consciousness.
• asfarley 7y ago
  This seems so intuitively wrong to me; like postulating that Windows is necessary for assembly to exist. Almost none of the preliminary claims in this article feel compelling to me: "no physical property or set of properties can explain what it’s like to be conscious". Where is the proof of this? All the author does is re-state this sentence in different ways. I imagine people have had similar conversations throughout history: "no one can really predict weather", "no-one understands economics", "no-one understands what makes people fall in love"; but would you claim that (for example) love is the trigger, or boundary condition which causes reality to coalesce? The claims which do feel believeable are: 1) Many aspects of physical reality are relational 2) Some boundary conditions are necessary in order to make everything well-defined But there is a real gap from the points above, to the conclusion that consciousness is the missing boundary-condition. Maybe we just haven't discovered the missing boundary-condition yet. Or maybe there is none, and reality is ill-defined. Everyone who's going on about "we don't know enough about the brain to even START this" feels like a Sunday-school teacher telling me not to question the Greater Truths. It's a thought-killing sentiment. It's a subconscious defense mechanism for people who can't admit that they're a mostly-deterministic machine.
  • leafeewick 7y ago
    I think Elon's neurolink will shed more light on the shroud of mystery that is consciousness. Maybe not, but I think there are people who are saying "damn the nay sayers" and just trying shit that they think can give some insight into how everything functions, up there.
• matiasz 7y ago
  Two physicists and a philosopher recently published a similar article that makes this point even more cogently, in my opinion. “The blind spot of science is the neglect of lived experience” https://aeon.co/essays/the-blind-spot-of-science-is-the-neglect-of-lived-experience https://aeon.co/essays/the-blind-spot-of-science-is-the-negl...
• pippy 7y ago
  This article highlights a massive issue with the field of philosophy in which there's a disconnect between advancements in neuroimaging analysis and metaphysics. The author claims that physical properties define "nothing at all". Yet what they tell are extremely valuable in emulating these systems and what they can teach us with the exploding fields of ML and AI. In the last decade big improvements have been made in the field neuroimaging. Trying to put the pieces together from neuroscience and emulation to lessons learnt is hard, but possible. There's a worrying trend that's becoming more apparent in regards to the hard problem of consciousness. New neuroimaging analysis techniques indicates that when you take away individual functional elements of how the brain, we're left not much at all. At what point does a series of embedded components become a computer? At what point does a series of neural networks become conscious? This is going to be an issue we're going to have to address now. Where is the line of conscious for an individual to make a legal choice? Think of someone wanting assisted suicide, in which they're often in a debilitated state. A call is going needed to be made if they're sentient enough. A tough call given it carries the massive burden. If we continue improving ML and AI we're going to have to make the call from the other end as well.
• entwife 7y ago
  This article reminds me of the difficulty ascribing meaning to data. The meaning of a series of bits - ASCII or Unicode, data or executable - is dependent on consciousness to give it meaning. Much like all of the physical observations of science.
• otakucode 7y ago
  >It’s as though someone created a very elaborate spreadsheet and carefully defined how the values in every cell would be related to the values in all of the other cells. However, if no one enters a definite value for at least one of these cells, then none of the cells will have values. Does it sound to anyone else like the author would benefit tremendously from learning the Lambda Calculus? It seems to me to be a disproof of the authors contention that a 'definite value' is needed at some point.
• jedharris 7y ago
  This is sad. We have good functional accounts of consciousness (Global Workspace theory [0], Attention Schema theory [1], recent robotics work on self-attention [2]). These explain much of the specific phenomenology of conscious experience. However Rawlette clearly is completely unfamiliar with this extensive and deeply empirical literature. "Armchair philosophy" like this still gets published way too much, and is given way too much respect. Rawlette, typical of this genre, believes that "conceivability", thought experiments independent of empirical facts, and verbal theorizing can justify beliefs more strongly than actual research. For good philosophy in this domain, read people like Andy Clark [3]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_workspace_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_workspace_theory [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attention_schema_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attention_schema_theory [2] https://www.quantamagazine.org/hod-lipson-is-building-self-aware-robots-20190711/ https://www.quantamagazine.org/hod-lipson-is-building-self-a... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_Clark https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_Clark
  • idlewords 7y ago
    Our lack of understanding of the phenomenon of consciousness and subjective experience is so total that it's hard to even imagine what an "explanation" could sound like. The sensation of existence is primordial and weird. I'm curious what you think "research" in these conditions can consist of, other than trying to find ways to frame the problem that permit for some kind of forward progress.
    • jedharris 7y ago
      How much of the empirical cognitive science and neuroscience research have you read? Graziano (discussed in my reference [1]) SPECIFICALLY addresses how and why our brains generate the primordial and weird experiences you mention. We know lots of ways our brains generate weird experiences, some built in (like dreams) and some produced by special context (any number of illusions). Why should consciousness have some special status?
      • idlewords 7y ago
• mensetmanusman 7y ago
  Commence with the 'there is no free will' crowd followed by argumentation that assumes free will (in order to change people's minds... which they have no control over).
• carapace 7y ago
  You can study consciousness, but not scientifically. The "trick" is that, though you can't make a scientific instrument to detect or measure consciousness, you do have one "instrument" to use: your own consciousness. For example, two people can "merge" and experience themselves as one.
  • lostmsu 7y ago
    That's unsubstantiated. Arguably, an ability of a person to play any specific multiplayer game at a specific time can be reasonably thought as a measure of consciousness. Then a simple ranking can be used to assign a number. It is a good theory as it clearly works with drugs, sleepiness, etc
• post_below 7y ago
  I understand the point the author wants to make, but I think they fail to make it. As an example, the idea that "there could be a mind that eats food but doesn't taste it" is silly. We were always going to evolve a way to "scan" food for it's properties. It just makes evolutionary sense. The more information the better. Not to mention the reward aspect (there is some reward for doing everything that contributes to survivial). Of course food tastes good. Another example the author uses "red looks red" is equally unconsidered. It's a mental representation of light. There are evolutionary reasons for being able to distinguish colors, and they have to be represented mentally somehow. Why doesn't it look like blue? Who cares? All that matters is that it has a distinct representation. Also in the article, the "why do rotten eggs smell bad" example... Because sulfurous compounds are the result of the metabolic processes of various bacteria. Because those bacteria are present in rotting things, which can cause illness, we have evolved to find them repellent. Why are my experiences different from others? Because that's just how biological organisms beyond a certain complexity work. No two are alike. A similarly obvious explanation exists for every example in the article. I see no compelling case that experience cannot be described through biological processes or that consciousness didn't arise from complexity. I'm not saying there aren't interesting mysteries where consciousness is concerned, just that this article seems to completely fail to explore them.
  • MrScruff 7y ago
    I’m not sure of the point you’re making. The point is it’s entirely possible to conceive of a complex biological agent that can take actions on the basis of sensory input data without invoking the need for a subjective experience. That would be the ‘philosophical zombie’ described by David Chalmers. However we have a subjective experience of what it ‘feels like’ to see red. Why is that needed?
    • gnode 7y ago
      Any agent which has the ability to perceive red must have some mechanism which corresponds to that percept. The percept of red has to be different to other percepts so that it is not mistaken for something that is not red. It is subjective because the agent has no mechanism for objective experience. I think to conceive of a philosophical zombie, you have to say that consciousness is something uniquely special in that something possessing all its describing qualities is not it.
• ARandomerDude 7y ago
  I wonder if she knows this is essentially the Kalam cosmological argument for God's existence. The heavens declare the glory of God, and the sky above proclaims his handiwork. Day to day pours out speech, and night to night reveals knowledge. (Psalm 19:1-2, ESV)
• PeterStuer 7y ago
  All models are wrong, some models are useful. I could start by dissecting the article and detail the sloppyness in the reasoning, the strawman of ignoring emergence, the value and inevitability of referential semantics etc, but ultimately the deeper question remains: How is the proposed model supposed to be useful?
• oneiroviator 7y ago
  After reading this somewhat innocuous article and then going through this thread... I think the reason there is so much heated discussion here is that the simple suggestion to invert one's assumptions regarding physical reality and consciousness, also implies an inversion of responsibility. If it really is the case that consciousness is the basis for reality, then it must also mean that only you, the reader, can find this out for yourself. Then this means you cannot fall back to preachers or scientific publications. It's up to you to do the work. From my experience, even just mentioning this idea of goal-driven contemplative practice often finds a lot of resistance if you don't approach it carefully.
• TaupeRanger 7y ago
  This thread is depressingly chock-full of people who just do not understand the argument being made here. The same tired old counterarguments of "it's just like elan vitale was before we understood biology" are being trotted out again and again, with no attempt at understanding how flawed that talking point is (and has been for years).
• proc0 7y ago
  Still doesn't explain what it is, therefore it is almost pointless to answer this. Not sure how whether it came first, second or third matters to explaining what it really is and its relationship on reality.
• hi41 7y ago
  I don’t agree that consciousness came first. Before I was born, there was a large amount of time when I and my consciousness did not exist. Yet the objective world as we know exited then.
• LocalH 7y ago
  I personally feel that some of the answers regarding consciousness and sentience may be found when we finally destigmatize psychedelics and allow structured, ethical studies and real analysis. Anyone who has had a really profound psychedelic experience knows that there is something more to our minds than we all realize. We barely know how it works, and it can't easily even really be explained to one who hasn't had a psychedelic experience. Note that I am not advocating reckless exploration of psychedelics. A person needs to do a lot of research and self-reflection to put themselves in the mindset to even consider tripping. But for those who can handle them, there are paths to self-growth and self-repair that are unmatched in modern medicine. Personally, my (unfounded but by personal experience) belief is that what we know as consciousness or sentience is driven by a specific balance of psychoactive substances that are naturally metabolized in the body and brain, and many neurological disorders are due to an imbalance in those substances. DMT helped me take great steps towards fighting ADHD
• deleted 7y ago
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• garamirez 7y ago
  From my (very) personal point of view, I think consciousness has nothing to do with sensor or motor functions...we know so little about what we (as humans) and "conscious" beings really are that we're always in the realm of conjectures. Self-awareness is a so complicated subject to define anyways.