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This is sad. We have good functional accounts of consciousness (Global Workspace theory [0], Attention Schema theory [1], recent robotics work on self-attention

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
    There is no neuroscience paper you can cite that can make anyone in this thread say "oh, so THAT'S why 'red' looks red!" In this case, you're begging the question by saying "our brains." Why is there a 'we' at all? Why is there subjective experience? I don't expect to find the answer in a Hacker News thread, but I think waving off the question the way you do is ridiculous. We've had some of our best people on it for millennia for a reason!
    - acqq 7y ago
      > Why is there subjective experience? It evolved in animals because it is advantageous. It is known that even the simplest worms can make a difference between the part of their own body and the body of the other worm or the rest of the environment: they would eat another worm but not their own tail. Worms eating their body are typically not having an advantage (but the local optimums of scarifying a part of the body can of course still develop). So the "subjective experience" of distinguishing between "me" and "anything else" allows the living things to protect themselves from the rest of the environment. Then if you question "why are there living things" the answer is again that they evolved exactly because the property of these units "preserving" themselves and duplicating that behavior -- these entities which don't have such properties remain lifeless and don't reproduce. In short, a "subjective experience" is still a "simple" emerging property of the complex enough living organisms. I intentionally quote "simple" as for us it is "of course" not simple, even if it can be reduced to such a simple explanation. The reason for that is again known today: the existence of life as we know it today is a result of the 14 billion years of the development of the environment during which effectively each moment and every detail happening just a bit different could have resulted in what we know as our environment not existing in this very form we know today and therefore "we" as we understand us to be wouldn't exist too. Even starting from the basic "building blocks": today we know that for the atoms in our body to exist, they had to be produced in some exploding star, for all elements except for hydrogen which was produced shortly after the Big Bang (so only hydrogen atoms in our bodies are as old as the Big Bang, it's so amazing to be able to know that!). The stars from which we are made had to "happen" to "develop" "just right" for us to be able to exist. In the areas of the Universe where they developed a little different, we know that we can't search for the life like ours. So we are in "just right" part of the Universe, even if we know that there are many parts that could also be "just right." But the other "just right" places will still develop something not exactly the same like our place here even if there would be a lot of common properties. They aren't "we." We is the result of everything that happened in the part of the Universe relevant to us since the Big Bang. At the end, all "why" questions have sense only in a predefined context where both the one asking and the one answering agree that the answer is satisfying. If the one asking asks knowing that no answer will be satisfying, or no shared context is known, there's seldom point in asking: See Feynman's take on "why questions": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dp4dpeJVDxs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dp4dpeJVDxs (an extended quote starts) "Q: If you get hold of two magnets and you push them you can feel this pushing between them. Turn them the other way and they slam together. Now what is it, the feeling between those two magnets? RF: What do you mean what's the feeling? Q: Well, there's something there isn't it? I mean that's the sensation that there's something there when you push these two magnets together. RF: Listen to my question: what is the meaning, when you say that there's is a feeling, of course you feel it, now what do you want to know?" Q: What I want to know is, what's going on between the other bits of these two bits of metal. RF: They repel each other. Q: Well then, what does that mean, or why are they doing that or how are they doing it? RF: You ask... Q: I'm not saying.. I think that's a perfectly reasonable question. RF: Of course it's reasonable, it's an excellent question. The problem that you're asking: You see, when you ask why something happens, how does a person answer why something happens? For example: "Aunt Minnie is in hospital." "Why?" "Because she slipped, she went out, she slipped on the ice and broke her hip." -- that satisfies the people. It satisfies them, but it wouldn't satisfy someone who came from another planet and knew nothing about that. The first-graders understand why: "when you break your hip you go to the hospital." "How do you get to the hospital with that hip, when the hip is broken?" "Well, because her husband seeing that she has had her hip broken has called the hospital up and sent somebody to get her." All that is understood by people and when you explain "a why" you have to be in some framework that you allow for something to be true otherwise you're perpetually asking why. "Why did the husband call up the hospital?" "Because husband is interested in his wife's welfare." Not always, some husbands aren't interested in their wife's welfare, when they're drunk and they're angry and... So you begin to get a very interesting understanding of the world and all its complications. If you try to follow anything up you go deeper and deeper in various directions. For example you'd go: "Why did she slip on the ice? Well, ice is slippery, everybody knows that, no problem, but I asked why is ice slippery"..." (an extended quote ends) So if you'd say "but the subjective experience that a worm has is not my subjective experience" the answer is "of course it isn't." If you'd claim that something would have to be able to tell you about its subjective experience for you to accept that it is like yours then you'd exclude those humans who can't talk, etc. The language is of course an emerging property, most of people can agree with that. At the end, these who try to claim a specific emerging property among the living organisms as something "very special" ("the feeling of me being different from the rest") somehow want to exclude that specific emerging property from all the rest, and they have some special motivation to do so. But it's still just an emerging property.
eblanshey 7y ago
I looked into the article you linked regarding self-attention. I quote: > Yes, we have a different definition that we use that is very concrete. It’s mathematical, you can measure it, you can quantify it, you can compute the error to what degree. Philosophers might say, “Well, that’s not how we see self-awareness.” Then the discussion usually becomes very vague. You can argue that our definition is not really self-awareness. But we have something that’s very grounded and easy to quantify, because we have a benchmark. So he's redefining something in a way that merely satisfies his world view. That is not in any way consciousness. Consciousness inherently has the "knowing" quality of your experience: you know you are reading this. You can make the smartest, brightest AI robot, with the best machine learning algorithms, that functions the same as a human being, but in the end, it doesn't know it's doing that because it isn't conscious of it. Hell you don't even need a robot for that. A person that has recently died has all the components you need for a functional human being. The only thing missing is that it isn't conscious anymore. You can fix/replace the heart, do whatever you need physically, but changing the physical building blocks, as per the materialist view, won't bring the consciousness back.
- lostmsu 7y ago
  Your dead person example is bad. The fact, that you can't reasonably restore a shattered glass does not give glasses any special properties.
  - eblanshey 7y ago
    Not sure about that, the example was more like, you CAN restore the shattered glass 100%, but there will still be something missing from it even if you do.
    - lostmsu 7y ago
      That does not address the point of the argument. And if you could restore a body why do you think consciousness would not return? Alcohol example kinda hints that it's exactly how it works.

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
  There is no neuroscience paper you can cite that can make anyone in this thread say "oh, so THAT'S why 'red' looks red!" In this case, you're begging the question by saying "our brains." Why is there a 'we' at all? Why is there subjective experience? I don't expect to find the answer in a Hacker News thread, but I think waving off the question the way you do is ridiculous. We've had some of our best people on it for millennia for a reason!
  - acqq 7y ago
    > Why is there subjective experience? It evolved in animals because it is advantageous. It is known that even the simplest worms can make a difference between the part of their own body and the body of the other worm or the rest of the environment: they would eat another worm but not their own tail. Worms eating their body are typically not having an advantage (but the local optimums of scarifying a part of the body can of course still develop). So the "subjective experience" of distinguishing between "me" and "anything else" allows the living things to protect themselves from the rest of the environment. Then if you question "why are there living things" the answer is again that they evolved exactly because the property of these units "preserving" themselves and duplicating that behavior -- these entities which don't have such properties remain lifeless and don't reproduce. In short, a "subjective experience" is still a "simple" emerging property of the complex enough living organisms. I intentionally quote "simple" as for us it is "of course" not simple, even if it can be reduced to such a simple explanation. The reason for that is again known today: the existence of life as we know it today is a result of the 14 billion years of the development of the environment during which effectively each moment and every detail happening just a bit different could have resulted in what we know as our environment not existing in this very form we know today and therefore "we" as we understand us to be wouldn't exist too. Even starting from the basic "building blocks": today we know that for the atoms in our body to exist, they had to be produced in some exploding star, for all elements except for hydrogen which was produced shortly after the Big Bang (so only hydrogen atoms in our bodies are as old as the Big Bang, it's so amazing to be able to know that!). The stars from which we are made had to "happen" to "develop" "just right" for us to be able to exist. In the areas of the Universe where they developed a little different, we know that we can't search for the life like ours. So we are in "just right" part of the Universe, even if we know that there are many parts that could also be "just right." But the other "just right" places will still develop something not exactly the same like our place here even if there would be a lot of common properties. They aren't "we." We is the result of everything that happened in the part of the Universe relevant to us since the Big Bang. At the end, all "why" questions have sense only in a predefined context where both the one asking and the one answering agree that the answer is satisfying. If the one asking asks knowing that no answer will be satisfying, or no shared context is known, there's seldom point in asking: See Feynman's take on "why questions": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dp4dpeJVDxs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dp4dpeJVDxs (an extended quote starts) "Q: If you get hold of two magnets and you push them you can feel this pushing between them. Turn them the other way and they slam together. Now what is it, the feeling between those two magnets? RF: What do you mean what's the feeling? Q: Well, there's something there isn't it? I mean that's the sensation that there's something there when you push these two magnets together. RF: Listen to my question: what is the meaning, when you say that there's is a feeling, of course you feel it, now what do you want to know?" Q: What I want to know is, what's going on between the other bits of these two bits of metal. RF: They repel each other. Q: Well then, what does that mean, or why are they doing that or how are they doing it? RF: You ask... Q: I'm not saying.. I think that's a perfectly reasonable question. RF: Of course it's reasonable, it's an excellent question. The problem that you're asking: You see, when you ask why something happens, how does a person answer why something happens? For example: "Aunt Minnie is in hospital." "Why?" "Because she slipped, she went out, she slipped on the ice and broke her hip." -- that satisfies the people. It satisfies them, but it wouldn't satisfy someone who came from another planet and knew nothing about that. The first-graders understand why: "when you break your hip you go to the hospital." "How do you get to the hospital with that hip, when the hip is broken?" "Well, because her husband seeing that she has had her hip broken has called the hospital up and sent somebody to get her." All that is understood by people and when you explain "a why" you have to be in some framework that you allow for something to be true otherwise you're perpetually asking why. "Why did the husband call up the hospital?" "Because husband is interested in his wife's welfare." Not always, some husbands aren't interested in their wife's welfare, when they're drunk and they're angry and... So you begin to get a very interesting understanding of the world and all its complications. If you try to follow anything up you go deeper and deeper in various directions. For example you'd go: "Why did she slip on the ice? Well, ice is slippery, everybody knows that, no problem, but I asked why is ice slippery"..." (an extended quote ends) So if you'd say "but the subjective experience that a worm has is not my subjective experience" the answer is "of course it isn't." If you'd claim that something would have to be able to tell you about its subjective experience for you to accept that it is like yours then you'd exclude those humans who can't talk, etc. The language is of course an emerging property, most of people can agree with that. At the end, these who try to claim a specific emerging property among the living organisms as something "very special" ("the feeling of me being different from the rest") somehow want to exclude that specific emerging property from all the rest, and they have some special motivation to do so. But it's still just an emerging property.

eblanshey 7y ago

I looked into the article you linked regarding self-attention. I quote: > Yes, we have a different definition that we use that is very concrete. It’s mathematical, you can measure it, you can quantify it, you can compute the error to what degree. Philosophers might say, “Well, that’s not how we see self-awareness.” Then the discussion usually becomes very vague. You can argue that our definition is not really self-awareness. But we have something that’s very grounded and easy to quantify, because we have a benchmark. So he's redefining something in a way that merely satisfies his world view. That is not in any way consciousness. Consciousness inherently has the "knowing" quality of your experience: you know you are reading this. You can make the smartest, brightest AI robot, with the best machine learning algorithms, that functions the same as a human being, but in the end, it doesn't know it's doing that because it isn't conscious of it. Hell you don't even need a robot for that. A person that has recently died has all the components you need for a functional human being. The only thing missing is that it isn't conscious anymore. You can fix/replace the heart, do whatever you need physically, but changing the physical building blocks, as per the materialist view, won't bring the consciousness back.

lostmsu 7y ago
Your dead person example is bad. The fact, that you can't reasonably restore a shattered glass does not give glasses any special properties.
- eblanshey 7y ago
  Not sure about that, the example was more like, you CAN restore the shattered glass 100%, but there will still be something missing from it even if you do.
  - lostmsu 7y ago
    That does not address the point of the argument. And if you could restore a body why do you think consciousness would not return? Alcohol example kinda hints that it's exactly how it works.