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I'm super curious about people who make this claim. Are you not conscious? The idea that there are people walking around who look and act like everybody else bu

I'm super curious about people who make this claim. Are you not conscious? The idea that there are people walking around who look and act like everybody else but behind the eyes there is nothing is terrifying and exhilarating to me. I'm open to the idea that when you observe yourself there is nothing looking back at you, but that doesn't generalize the necessarily subjective experience.

trevyn 7y ago
I think “subjective experience” in the everyday human sense is something that we learn / are taught to have — we are taught as children that there is this thing called “me”, how it works, and how to put sensory experiences into its context. Unlearning that — understanding that this model is one interpretation, but not the only interpretation — is indeed terrifying and exhilarating. I personally wouldn’t call my experience “not conscious”, but it can be a very different experience than what we consider normal everyday waking consciousness.
- ganzuul 7y ago
  The root of this puzzle is described by Descartes' "I think, therefore I am." 'Thinking' here does not need to be rational thought. Perhaps it does not even need to be the ability to form new memories. It is hard to say anything meaningful about the dichotomy of one's personal existence but for the purpose of my question it should not matter. In altered states of awareness such as dissociation or 'ego death' this conscious 'eye' which observes one's experiences remains unchanged. It is not the idea of the self described by "I am I", but the self which only asserts its own existence as "I am".
  - trevyn 7y ago
    In my mind, once you strip down “I am” to “There appears to exist a repeating neural process that is creating a compressed embedding and record of sensory inputs”, it’s just not very mysterious or worthy of much further philosophical analysis. So these other humans in the world are probably just deterministic robots just like me, that may or may not feel like they have magic conscious aliveness. But my personal experience tells me that I can turn the “sense” of magic conscious aliveness on or off, and so it too is likely just a neural process that is not particularly interesting. I observe that the vast majority of other humans do not seem to be able to disable this sense at will, which does not to me imply that they are somehow more magically conscious, just that they have not experienced that particular switch flipping. Add in the historic social knowledge of “consciousness”, the historical record of neuroscience knowledge, and the rates at which scientific knowledge is processed and absorbed by the public at large, and it really seems like an obvious non-problem.
    - ganzuul 7y ago
      That's an absolutely fascinating thing to claim... Your description sounds like what I have very recently read about research into artificial neural networks, which would have vast implications for the future of the field. I have not ever seriously considered the ability to turn consciousness on and off at will. In my experience consciousness is absolute and once deep in reverie when I happened upon a mental switch to turn seemingly everything off I instead experienced a brief 'no-mind' blank state and a moment later my mind basically 'rebooted'. During no-mind, "I am" was definitely there but there was no thought to reflect this fact. There was an observer with nothing to observe. Normally, the only interruption to consciousness that I experience is for the time between wakefulness and dream and for this period I have no recollection. Is this no-mind state what you mean by turning off consciousness?
      - trevyn 7y ago
        I mean turning off the sense of intention or agency (i.e. “conscious” decision-making), as well as the sense of self (i.e. self-“consciousness”). There is still awareness of sensory inputs and memory of events, but there is no sense of making deliberate choices, personal identification with the sensory data or events, or emotional response. So there is, for linguistic convenience, “a body” doing things, but it doesn’t feel like it’s “mine” or that “I can control it”. Overall it feels lightly dissociative, and I can carry on normal everyday interactions in this state; it feels like everything is on auto-pilot and the body knows what to do, probably mostly by habit. I mention this particular state because it seems to reveal that the feeling of being an agentic self is a specific construction of mind, and that it can be intentionally deconstructed while maintaining other brain functions. There are lots of related directions one can go with this; the “no-mind” state you mention and the techniques to achieve it are excellent to practice with.
        ganzuul 7y ago
        I understand. However self-consciousness is not what I mean by consciousness. If you observe 'your' actions there is still something there along for the ride. It is this which I surmise is common for all humans.
jayd16 7y ago
You don't understand. In their mind they are not special. To a determinist, the way you feel about yourself is exactly how a fully deterministic being would feel because, in this theory, you are deterministic. Ascribing to new theories doesn't change the world at all, they can only change your understanding of how the world already existed.
- ganzuul 7y ago
  Doesn't this perspective generalize to monism? I.e. everything is conscious? I don't have a problem with that, but the only way I can consolidate someone's claim that consciousness does not exist is if their experience differs from mine.
  - jayd16 7y ago
    I don't think that's strictly the only interpretation. In the same sense that some things are mechanized and something things are not, some objects can have consciousness while some do not. Consciousness is certainly less unique in this interpretation but I'm not sure that means its so uninteresting that we must say a rock is conscious. That said, I think the OP is conflating free will with consciousness which I think is a mistake. I think its more useful to keep the definition of consciousness as only a sense of self. Even if universal determinism does not exists, one could imagine an AI built in classical physics that exhibits a sense of self deterministically.
ncmncm 7y ago
Are you asking me? Obviously we all experience what we call consciousness, noticing ourselves noticing, and we all imagine we have free will, which really only means we don't know what we will do tomorrow. But neither of those have anything to do with physics, except to the degree that the stuff we are made out of runs according to physics. So, anybody supposing that either concept has anything to do with quantum physics is barking up something that is not even a tree.
- ganzuul 7y ago
  Yes, well, we can't notice each other noticing. Yesterday I watched an ML researcher talk far and wide about how one can build consciousness out of an attention mechanism and finally at the end someone in the audience called him out on his BS and he admitted the had an 'easy problem of consciousness' concept. IMO that should never be called consciousness in the first place. It may soon be downright dangerous to confuse the content of the mind for its entirety, because real mind-machine interfaces are already working in monkeys. We need to prepare ourselves to deal with consciousness for real, but since the experience remains subjective our normal assumptions are not as effective. Right now we can not say with confidence that everyone with a functioning mind is conscious. The tools of physics are developing and while working out the kinks of the standard model a new set of tools are emerging. These tools deal with information and complexity. The boundary between the terms 'entropy' of CS and physics is blurring, and decoherence is a physical information process. Many ANN research papers that I have read use concepts familiar from physics. Why would there exist separate realities for information processes, consciousness, and physics? Personally I think that consciousness is inseparable from physics and it makes no sense to say that one precedes the other. I think our minds simply notice a universe of consciousness and our confusion comes from adding retrievable memory on top of it. I challenge anyone to come up with a simpler explanation...
  - ncmncm 7y ago
    To say "consciousness is inseparable from physics" reads like nonsense to me. You might as well say "speed is inseparable from cars", or "corporate governance is inseparable from office chairs". Studying one tells you nothing about the other, and mentioning both in the same sentence justs suggests you are confused but don't know it.

trevyn 7y ago

I think “subjective experience” in the everyday human sense is something that we learn / are taught to have — we are taught as children that there is this thing called “me”, how it works, and how to put sensory experiences into its context. Unlearning that — understanding that this model is one interpretation, but not the only interpretation — is indeed terrifying and exhilarating. I personally wouldn’t call my experience “not conscious”, but it can be a very different experience than what we consider normal everyday waking consciousness.

ganzuul 7y ago
The root of this puzzle is described by Descartes' "I think, therefore I am." 'Thinking' here does not need to be rational thought. Perhaps it does not even need to be the ability to form new memories. It is hard to say anything meaningful about the dichotomy of one's personal existence but for the purpose of my question it should not matter. In altered states of awareness such as dissociation or 'ego death' this conscious 'eye' which observes one's experiences remains unchanged. It is not the idea of the self described by "I am I", but the self which only asserts its own existence as "I am".
- trevyn 7y ago
  In my mind, once you strip down “I am” to “There appears to exist a repeating neural process that is creating a compressed embedding and record of sensory inputs”, it’s just not very mysterious or worthy of much further philosophical analysis. So these other humans in the world are probably just deterministic robots just like me, that may or may not feel like they have magic conscious aliveness. But my personal experience tells me that I can turn the “sense” of magic conscious aliveness on or off, and so it too is likely just a neural process that is not particularly interesting. I observe that the vast majority of other humans do not seem to be able to disable this sense at will, which does not to me imply that they are somehow more magically conscious, just that they have not experienced that particular switch flipping. Add in the historic social knowledge of “consciousness”, the historical record of neuroscience knowledge, and the rates at which scientific knowledge is processed and absorbed by the public at large, and it really seems like an obvious non-problem.
  - ganzuul 7y ago
    That's an absolutely fascinating thing to claim... Your description sounds like what I have very recently read about research into artificial neural networks, which would have vast implications for the future of the field. I have not ever seriously considered the ability to turn consciousness on and off at will. In my experience consciousness is absolute and once deep in reverie when I happened upon a mental switch to turn seemingly everything off I instead experienced a brief 'no-mind' blank state and a moment later my mind basically 'rebooted'. During no-mind, "I am" was definitely there but there was no thought to reflect this fact. There was an observer with nothing to observe. Normally, the only interruption to consciousness that I experience is for the time between wakefulness and dream and for this period I have no recollection. Is this no-mind state what you mean by turning off consciousness?
    - trevyn 7y ago
      I mean turning off the sense of intention or agency (i.e. “conscious” decision-making), as well as the sense of self (i.e. self-“consciousness”). There is still awareness of sensory inputs and memory of events, but there is no sense of making deliberate choices, personal identification with the sensory data or events, or emotional response. So there is, for linguistic convenience, “a body” doing things, but it doesn’t feel like it’s “mine” or that “I can control it”. Overall it feels lightly dissociative, and I can carry on normal everyday interactions in this state; it feels like everything is on auto-pilot and the body knows what to do, probably mostly by habit. I mention this particular state because it seems to reveal that the feeling of being an agentic self is a specific construction of mind, and that it can be intentionally deconstructed while maintaining other brain functions. There are lots of related directions one can go with this; the “no-mind” state you mention and the techniques to achieve it are excellent to practice with.
      - ganzuul 7y ago
        I understand. However self-consciousness is not what I mean by consciousness. If you observe 'your' actions there is still something there along for the ride. It is this which I surmise is common for all humans.

jayd16 7y ago

You don't understand. In their mind they are not special. To a determinist, the way you feel about yourself is exactly how a fully deterministic being would feel because, in this theory, you are deterministic. Ascribing to new theories doesn't change the world at all, they can only change your understanding of how the world already existed.

ganzuul 7y ago
Doesn't this perspective generalize to monism? I.e. everything is conscious? I don't have a problem with that, but the only way I can consolidate someone's claim that consciousness does not exist is if their experience differs from mine.
- jayd16 7y ago
  I don't think that's strictly the only interpretation. In the same sense that some things are mechanized and something things are not, some objects can have consciousness while some do not. Consciousness is certainly less unique in this interpretation but I'm not sure that means its so uninteresting that we must say a rock is conscious. That said, I think the OP is conflating free will with consciousness which I think is a mistake. I think its more useful to keep the definition of consciousness as only a sense of self. Even if universal determinism does not exists, one could imagine an AI built in classical physics that exhibits a sense of self deterministically.

ncmncm 7y ago

Are you asking me? Obviously we all experience what we call consciousness, noticing ourselves noticing, and we all imagine we have free will, which really only means we don't know what we will do tomorrow. But neither of those have anything to do with physics, except to the degree that the stuff we are made out of runs according to physics. So, anybody supposing that either concept has anything to do with quantum physics is barking up something that is not even a tree.

ganzuul 7y ago
Yes, well, we can't notice each other noticing. Yesterday I watched an ML researcher talk far and wide about how one can build consciousness out of an attention mechanism and finally at the end someone in the audience called him out on his BS and he admitted the had an 'easy problem of consciousness' concept. IMO that should never be called consciousness in the first place. It may soon be downright dangerous to confuse the content of the mind for its entirety, because real mind-machine interfaces are already working in monkeys. We need to prepare ourselves to deal with consciousness for real, but since the experience remains subjective our normal assumptions are not as effective. Right now we can not say with confidence that everyone with a functioning mind is conscious. The tools of physics are developing and while working out the kinks of the standard model a new set of tools are emerging. These tools deal with information and complexity. The boundary between the terms 'entropy' of CS and physics is blurring, and decoherence is a physical information process. Many ANN research papers that I have read use concepts familiar from physics. Why would there exist separate realities for information processes, consciousness, and physics? Personally I think that consciousness is inseparable from physics and it makes no sense to say that one precedes the other. I think our minds simply notice a universe of consciousness and our confusion comes from adding retrievable memory on top of it. I challenge anyone to come up with a simpler explanation...
- ncmncm 7y ago
  To say "consciousness is inseparable from physics" reads like nonsense to me. You might as well say "speed is inseparable from cars", or "corporate governance is inseparable from office chairs". Studying one tells you nothing about the other, and mentioning both in the same sentence justs suggests you are confused but don't know it.