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Consciousness Isn’t Self-Centered
- bionhoward 7y ago"But, as Deepak Chopra taught us, quantum physics means anything can happen at any time for no reason." - Professor Hubert Farnsworth
- nikivi 7y agoIt's things like these: https://twitter.com/rmartinledo/status/1233388613490139136 https://twitter.com/rmartinledo/status/1233388613490139136 That make you wonder how vast consciousness really is. And how self centered we are still as species. Eating other animals for 'pleasure'. It's sad.
- Erlich_Bachman 7y agoCould you explain why that particular video makes you think about that? I mean, do you consider the creatures on the picture as having a consciousness? Those look far from being conscious to me, they are just small creatures with a couple of functions like moving, finding food and eating...
- nikivi 7y agoI would argue humans are like this too, biologically speaking.
- trevyn 7y agoI only see simple biochemical machines in that video. Here’s what they look like when you zoom in a bit more: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=9RUHJhskW00&t=16 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=9RUHJhskW00&t=16 It’s literally chemical bonds breaking and forming, stochastically.
- nikivi 7y agoThat's fascinating. Thanks for the video.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- lisper 7y ago> Is it possible that alongside the conscious experience of “me,” there is a much dimmer experience of each individual neuron? No.
- babygoat 7y agoShow your work.
- lisper 7y agoIf everything that exists is conscious, then consciousness ceases to be a useful concept and becomes nothing more than a synonym for existence. The concept of consciousness is only useful to distinguish things that are conscious from things that are not. Humans and apes are conscious. Rocks and individual neurons are not. One can have a legitimate debate about the status of computers, great apes, dogs, rats, perhaps even fruit flies, but not rocks, transistors, or individual neurons.
- FreeHugs 7y ago1000 and 2000 are big numbers. 10 and 20 are not. One can have a legitimate debate about 48, 70 and 99 being big numbers. But not 30, 28 or 19.
- lisper 7y ago"Big" and "small" are not properties, they are relations. 1000 is big relative to 0.001, but it is small relative to 100000000. In common parlance, "big" and "small" are often used in context where the thing being related is implied, and usually taken to be a human being. Mountains are big (relative to humans) and ants are small (relative to humans). But ants are big relative to atoms and mountains are small relative to planets. But "conscious" isn't a relation, it's a property. Normal humans are conscious. Rocks are not. This is not to say that consciousness might not be a continuous property rather than a dichotomy; it almost certainly is. Nonetheless, there is a point at which the degree of consciousness in a system is indistinguishable from zero, at which point it is no longer useful to say that the thing is conscious.
- robbrown451 7y ago"Rather than consciousness arising when non-conscious matter behaves a particular way, is it possible that consciousness is an intrinsic property of matter—that it was there all along?" Umm, really? Sounds nice and touchy-feely new agey, but, I'm saying no. More likely you just haven't tried to define consciousness clearly and non-circularly, and when you do, it just kind of goes away as a concept. If you can tell me, in any sort of scientific terms, why a self driving car isn't conscious but a human is, maybe we can get somewhere.
- erikpukinskis 7y agoHow is this circular? Physics has the notion of an observer, which is inherent to all matter. This is just saying observer effects happen everywhere all the time and your skull is just concentrating it.
- Erlich_Bachman 7y ago"Observer" notion from physics (does not matter if we are talking about neutonian or QM or whatever) have nothing to do with consciousness. "Observer" in physics is just a description of a certain point of view within the system. The connection of that to consciousness is usually done by popular quasi-philosophy books loosely based on physics and using some of the same terms, they do not come from the physics itself.
- Causality1 7y agoCorrect. "Observer" is just shorthand for "probability collapsing interaction".
- erikpukinskis 7y agoSaying there is no connection is an unfalsifiable claim, so you’ve departed the realm of science with that one.
- Erlich_Bachman 7y ago
- unkulunkulu 7y agoThis ties quite well with what Alan Watts says about the universal consciousness, its manifestations and the role of ego in all of this. Sometimes its quite believable that two consciousnesses coming in close contact for a moment give rise to something quite new and bigger than the parts.
- stevebmark 7y agoNautilus articles seem to frontpage on average once a weekend. The weird thing is the articles have very low engagement on HN in terms of comments. Given the weekly cadence and low engagement on every article this may mean Nautilus is running an internal upvote campaign.
- carapace 7y ago31 pts 26 comments now.
- grabbalacious 7y agoMy argument against panpsychism (the principled form of animism, which is ancient) is that to perceive something you have to have a representation of it in memory. Ergo if you don't have a memory system you can't be conscious of anything. Rocks don't have RAM.
- odyssey7 7y agoWhen I think about my first-person experience, it's something that happens in the present instant. The awareness of a distant and recent past may simply be a result of memory stimuli being presented by the brain to the consciousness at the present instant. In this model, if I went under anesthesia and the King Particle got knocked out of its orbit and got replaced by another, the new consciousness would believe it was a continuation of the earlier one, because it would receive the same stimuli that its predecessor would have, and part of that stimuli was evolved to elicit a sensation for the continuity of self. What this gets at is, is consciousness stateless? Is its experience a pure function of what is fed into it, or is it stateful?
- babygoat 7y agoAnimals don’t have RAM either. An understanding of organic memory systems has never been established.
- grabbalacious 7y agoYou're quite right. That last sentence was intended to be a catchy and rhetorical summary.
- FreeHugs 7y agoto perceive something you have to have a representation of it in memory Why? I cannot think of a definition of "perceive" that would lead to this conclusion.
- grabbalacious 7y agoYou have to learn to see stuff, or recognise sounds, for example.
- theredlion 7y agoTrash
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- agumonkey 7y agomaybe it's a wave between avatarial representations of other before us
- seemslegit 7y agoConsciousness is made of primordial cheese, formed by an interaction of a lactic field permeating the universe with spontaneously occuring quantum fermeons - if Nautilus is interested in this idea I'll be happy to elaborate on it in long form, complete with references to David Chalmers as well as James McIntyre.
- yes_man 7y agoIf anyone is interested in a framework that tries to put rigor into this otherwise very open-ended problem of defining consciousness, the integrated information theory (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_information_theory https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_information_theor...) is one approach. Problem with a "traditional" philosophical approach to consciousness is that it's hard to prove and equally hard to disprove. And although integrated information theory starts with the assumption that "consciousness exists", and builds on top of that assumption, at least it's a step in a direction where the problem of consciousness is turned into a measurable property. After all, even the most rigorous of natural sciences rest on some axioms. And I am not claiming that integrated information theory is in any way correct (although it may be). But theorizing about consciousness without a tangible logical framework always feels like it's not going anywhere, so I welcome the pursuit for scientific advancement in said theory
- carapace 7y agoI was thinking just this morning that I should write a book: Metaphysics for Computer Nerds & Computers for Metaphysicians. I am lonely in the intersection between mysticism and hard mathematical science. > And the fact that the hard problem has persisted for so many decades, despite the advances in neuroscience, has caused some scientists to wonder if we’ve been thinking about the problem backward. Rather than consciousness arising when non-conscious matter behaves a particular way, is it possible that consciousness is an intrinsic property of matter—that it was there all along? Why do folks present this idea like it's new and radical? It's literally thousands of years old. Aldous Huxley wrote "The Perennial Philosophy" in 1945. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Perennial_Philosophy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Perennial_Philosophy > However, it seems to me that the obstacle one faces here isn’t a combination problem but the confusion of consciousness with the concept of a self. ... And this concept of the self is an illusion. Recapitulate the basic finding of Buddhism, This has been known for thousands of years. > it may be more accurate to instead talk about the content and quality of conscious experience at any given location in spacetime, determined by the matter present there. Now we're gwtting somewhere... > would two brains wired together produce a new, integrated mind? In a word, yes. You don't even need to connect them with a corpus callosum, the bandwidth and latency of our built-in hardware is sufficient: "Psychedelic experiences associated with a novel hypnotic procedure, mutual hypnosis." https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/6080106 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/6080106 - - - - Gurdjieff presents a world system wherein (I am paraphrasing and condensing wildly and inaccurately here) the human isn't born with a soul but must construct one during it's mortal lifetime or "die like a dog" leaving nothing behind. There are (in this world model) three kinds of matter: terrestrial matter (of the Earth), stellar matter (of the Sun and solar system) and interstellar matter (which is stable outside the Sun's heliopause.) The process of constructing a soul proceeds in two stages. First one "coats" the physical body through and through with a stellar matter to make the "second being-body", and then again with interstellar matter to make the "third being-body" or soul. This third body is stable beyond the solar system and, importantly, beyond the death of the original physical body. The second being-body is not stable on it's own without the first or third bodies. I bring this up because it's a fascinating (IMO) third concept besides "humans do not have souls" and "humans do have souls": "humans are born w/o souls and must make them themselves before death". It also makes a kind of sense that, in order for your human consciousness to survive the death of the body, the material matrix within which and through which your human experience carries on, you need another nearly-identical body made out of more durable stuff.
- Leary 7y agoFound some interesting reading: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/mind-indian-buddhism/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/mind-indian-buddhism/ Perhaps someone well versed in this can tell us how this article's theory relates to the non-self that Buddhists have been talking about for 2,000 years.
- carapace 7y agoThe theory is pretty much standard Buddhism. Hinduism too for that matter (no pun intended.) "Atman is Paramatman"
- LargoLasskhyfv 7y agoConsciousness is just an emergent phenomenon caused by checksum errors in the filesystem/object store/younameit of the quantum foam storage of the akashic records. There...
- dimovich 7y agoWhen it comes to consciousness, I really like the ideas of Douglas Hofstadter [0]. This article feels like a step backwards from that. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_a_Strange_Loop https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_a_Strange_Loop