9 ms·

Why the central problem in neuroscience is mirrored in physics

65 points by dnetesn 7y ago

whatshisface 7y ago
The had problem of consciousness is related to neither neuroscience or physics, far from being a central problem in either. It's a central problem in philosophy.
- jamesrcole 7y ago
  How do you know it is unrelated to neuroscience? If you were to ask me whether I think neuroscience currently has any understanding of the hard problem of consciousness, I would say that I don't think they do. But it's still related to neuroscience.
- robbrown451 7y ago
  I notice that on the wikipedia page, an equal number of philosophers and cognitive neuroscientists are mentioned. For instance: "The existence of a "hard problem" is controversial. It has been accepted by philosophers of mind such as Joseph Levine, Colin McGinn, and Ned Block and cognitive neuroscientists such as Francisco Varela, Giulio Tononi, and Christof Koch. However, its existence is disputed by philosophers of mind such as Daniel Dennett, Massimo Pigliucci, and Keith Frankish and cognitive neuroscientists such as Stanislas Dehaene, Bernard Baars, and Antonio Damasio." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness
  - whatshisface 7y ago
    If a neuroscientist had an opinion about who should get elected president this year, that would not make the presidential election a neurological issue.
    - SubiculumCode 7y ago
      If the a hard problem is real, then it is a neuroscience issue. If it does not exist, then the illusion of it is a neuroscience issue.
      - whatshisface 7y ago
        What if consciousness real but not a neuroscience issue? If you want a thought experiment to illustrate that, imagine a VR world where the inhabitants are connected in with headsets. Nothing inside the world will explain why it feels to everyone like experiences are being exported out of it.
        robbrown451 7y ago
        "imagine a VR world" I don't see how this contributes any insights into the issue. How is that "world" any different from a real world experience, relevant to this issue? I mean, nothing in Disneyland's Pirates of the Caribbean ride explains "why it feels to everyone like experiences are being exported out of it" either.
        whatshisface 7y ago
        >nothing in Disneyland's Pirates of the Caribbean ride explains "why it feels to everyone like experiences are being exported out of it" either. Yeah, exactly. There's no way to tell if neuroscience is just the "Pirates of the Caribbean" ride through which something else is getting pulled through on boats. Is there any evidence one way or the other? What would evidence look like? I think it is beyond the reach of science because there is no experiment you could ever do that would illuminate it. Something that can only be resolved by discussing the options and choosing which one feels the most reasonable is philosophy, and not science.
        chr1 7y ago
        In all cases it is a Math issue. Either there exists some effective computation that would produce behavior similar to the behavior of conscious being, and could be performed in VR world too, or computation would require exponential resources, or (in the most unlikely case) such computation would not exist, and it would be possible to show why it cannot exist. Neuroscience and Physics can help to find the rules for that computation. And Philosophy can have fun talking about what lies beyond unknown.
    - robbrown451 7y ago
      No, but that's not the point. The fact that many of them are quoted or referenced suggests that their opinions are relevant, at least to Wikipedia editors. Most other articles on the subject continually reference neuroscience and neuroscientists. Regardless, not everything fits into neat little boxes. I would personally be more interested in the views of a neuroscientist on the matter, but then again I'd expect them to be likely to dismiss it as not being a problem at all. I'd also be interested in the views of someone who works with AI and the like. Personally I think the problem will be "solved" as soon as we have sufficiently advanced conversational assistants and we just start assuming they are conscious because they seem like they are. I think having that sort of thing in our daily lives will dramatically change people's intuitive perspective on the issue.
      - whatshisface 7y ago
        >I would personally be more interested in the views of a neuroscientist on the matter, Some neuroscientists having an interesting take on the election does not imply that elections are a neurological topic. Philosophy is open to contributions from amateurs.
        perl4ever 7y ago
        When and how did philosophy undergo professionalization? "Professionalization tends to result in establishing acceptable qualifications, one or more professional associations to recommend best practice and to oversee the conduct of members of the profession, and some degree of demarcation of the qualified from unqualified amateurs (that is, professional certification). It is also likely to create "occupational closure", closing the profession to entry from outsiders, amateurs and the unqualified."
        whatshisface 7y ago
        That's a huge question, but I think it happened in the 20th century during the academic boom.
  - TheOtherHobbes 7y ago
    There aren't many problems that go away just by being declared not-hard - or in extremis, not-a-real-problem. Especially not by being declared not-a-real-problem by the problem itself.
- erikerikson 7y ago
  As the philosophers have it, all fields are subfields of philosophy. If this is so, the problem in neuroscience and physics is by definition the same problem (perhaps with different scopes) and included in philosophy. However, I'm not left feeling like I've gained any knowledge from recognizing this. It is so that it has been an important problem in philosophy but do you expect anyone to be surprised by that knowledge?
  - oarabbus_ 7y ago
    >As the philosophers have it, all fields are subfields of philosophy. Seems a bit self-serving. Surely the physicists could make a claim that all fields (including philosophy) are subfields of physics.
    - evunveot 7y ago
      Is consciousness an emergent property of brains or are brains an emergent property of consciousness? That's the question.
    - naasking 7y ago
      No, because philosophy deals with any question, like "what is mathematics?", or "is there an objective standard for beauty?" which is completely outside the scope of physics. Physics is necessarily more limited as it's bound by the scientific process. In fact, the soundness of the scientific method itself is a philosophical argument, as it cannot be scientifically demonstrable without assuming the conclusion.
      - oarabbus_ 7y ago
        I've heard the challenge to that claim - a true GUT would explain all of those things, including any philosophical thought. Hence philosophy is a subset of physics.
        naasking 7y ago
        No, a GUT cannot explain why we should believe the mathematics of a GUT.
russdill 7y ago
This seems to fall a bit under the Dyson's "lumpers and splitters" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lumpers_and_splitters https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lumpers_and_splitters
umvi 7y ago
Interestingly, solving the hard problem of consciousness could effectively prove whether or not God exists. Most Abrahamic religious teach that everybody has a "spirit" inside their body, and these spirits are somehow responsible for the experience of consciousness and controlling the body like a hand inside a glove. This is further reinforced by heavenly visitors in religious texts (i.e. Jesus talking to prophets before 0 B.C. in the Bible would indicate that a body-less spirit is indeed conscious). Proving that consciousness is a totally explainable phenomenon given our current understanding of physics would essentially prove that (at least the Abrahamic) God doesn't exist (i.e. if we could create conscious machines on-demand). On the other hand, proving that consciousness is the result of some previously undiscovered form/interaction of matter could provide evidence of the existence of "spirits" (i.e. if said "ethereal" matter exists in brain before, but not after, death)
- piokoch 7y ago
  No, in "Abrahamic" religions we don't have a "spirit". According to those religions people have immortal soul, which is definitely not a "spirit". The "spirit" thing inside people that might "be freed" and haunt some secluded house is something coming from the domain of cheap horror movies and pseudo science TV shows. By definition souls is not something measurable, it does not belong to physical world so no amount of physics or neurology can "explain it", prove it existence or nonexistence. (I am theoretical physics PhD and Roman Catholic).
  - umvi 7y ago
    Not looking to argue here, but suffice to say, the Catholic view is not representative of all Abrahamic religions (or even just Christianity); I was trying to give as generic as possible an explanation that covers the jist of most Abrahamic faiths without diving into semantics of "spirit" vs. "soul" (which apparently can vary).
  - ajna91 7y ago
    This is the Thomistic view, not the official Catholic view, no? Also, what about this verse? "For the word of God is living and operative and sharper than any two-edged sword, and piercing even to the dividing of soul and spirit and of joints and marrow, and able to discern the thoughts and intentions of the heart."
fennecfoxen 7y ago
The problem of consciousness is about understanding systems which feed back into themselves, build a model of themselves, and reason about themselves. The structure underneath is well known, if not perfectly understood. The problem of physics is that it’s not clear what the structure of reality is. It is not known in the slightest but it seems unlikely it has a connection to metacognition. Article connects these with a lame “software running on unknown hardware” analogy and works to suggest the universe could run on consciousness, or something incoherent like that. tldr article looks like it’s pretty much trash popsci; why is it even here? Kill it with fire ;)
- jfengel 7y ago
  Worse: popphil.
  - fennecfoxen 7y ago
    "These two phenomenon have an important, fundamental connection: As laypeople, we don't understand anything about how either of them work." — works for either of them
- cairo_x 7y ago
  > The problem of consciousness is about understanding systems which feed back into themselves, build a model of themselves, and reason about themselves. The structure underneath is well known, if not perfectly understood. The problem is you could build a system that satisfies each of those states and we still couldn't prove if it had qualia or not. That is literally 'the hard problem'.
carapace 7y ago
Excellent article. You can't study consciousness directly in a lab but it's pretty easy to "merge" with others under the right conditions. For example, here's an old experiment with "mutual hypnosis": two people hypnotizing each other at the same time. "Psychedelic experiences associated with a novel hypnotic procedure, mutual hypnosis." Am J Clin Hypn. 1967 Oct;10(2):65-78. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/6080106 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/6080106 Anything which causes entrainment between two dynamic systems is essentially combining them into one dynamic system. E.g. something as simple as deliberately breathing in sync with each other can begin to develop consciousness merging.
- smt88 7y ago
  > "Psychedelic experiences associated with a novel hypnotic procedure, mutual hypnosis." Am J Clin Hypn. 1967 Oct;10(2):65-78. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/6080106* https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/6080106* Like much of Tart's other work "studying" the paranormal[1], this is pseudoscience. There is no good evidence for hypnosis. 1. http://skepdic.com/tart.html http://skepdic.com/tart.html
  - carapace 7y ago
    Capital-S Skeptics are a strongly biased source, eh? > There is no good evidence for hypnosis. That's just ridiculous.
    - ci5er 7y ago
      > That's just ridiculous. Depends on your definition of 'hypnosis'. There are some pretty prosaic definitions that are clearly and repeatably demonstrable. There are also, at the other end of the spectrum, some pretty extraordinary claims for "what it is" and "what it can do". The former is riduculous, and for the latter, skepticism seems to be prudent, pending further articulation.
      - carapace 7y ago
        > Depends on your definition of 'hypnosis'. Well, yeah. The best book on hypnosis I know of opens with one of the co-authors stating that "there's no such thing as hypnosis" and the other stating "everything is hypnosis". > The former is ridiculous ... The "clearly and repeatably demonstrable" definitions are ridiculous?
evunveot 7y ago
The article talks about a philosophical concept called "dual-aspect monism" which, in the author's interpretation, basically means that everything we think of as physical/material has some kind of consciousness, and that our own consciousness emerges somehow from the interactions of the elementary consciousnesses of the particles in our brains. So consciousness is the hardware of reality and physical phenomena are the software, an inversion of the typical materialist view. (As a programmer, I'm not sure that metaphor really works, but I'll allow it.) The author presents this as an avenue for confronting the likelihood that even a perfect understanding/modeling of the physical characteristics of a brain is unlikely to reveal anything about consciousness or subjective experience itself. Seems plausible to me. Reality tends to make sense, so if it's most likely impossible to make sense of consciousness by studying the brain, there's probably some other way to look at it. The idea that fundamental particles like electrons have some kind of subjective experience was hard to swallow at first, but then I thought about my cat. It's safe to say that a cat's consciousness is more primitive than a typical human's. You can also say that cats (at least once you get to know them) are a lot more predictable than people and have a smaller set of possible behaviors and reactions. If my cat sees a bug on the wall, she's going to do her weird hiss-snarl thing at it just about 100% of the time, and there's 0% chance she's going to roll up a newspaper and swat it. If the consciousness of a particular entity can be ranked in comparison to that of other entities — like I would rank my consciousness as "higher" than my cat's — and if entities with "lower consciousnesses" have fewer possible behaviors or reactions to stimuli (like my cat compared to me, or a broccoli plant in my garden compared to my cat), then it's easy to imagine that something as elementary as an electron could be conscious in some way and still obey what appear to be totally deterministic rules. (Electron may have been a bad example since we can't really observe them like we can cats, but the point stands.) Another way to state it would be that as consciousness rises, so does free will (or, at least, scope of behavior). I'm also reminded of: John 1:1-3 (NKJV) — "In the beginning was the Word[0], and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through Him, and without Him nothing was made that was made." [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logos https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logos Of course, consciousness potentially being "the hardware of reality" doesn't necessarily mean God exists. But it fits.
- 7y ago
cairo_x 7y ago
Another difficulty of consciousness is it may not be transient. It may pop in and out of existence, and the only thing giving each instance the illusion of transience are the memories each previous instance have generated. The problem now is the fuzzy definition of a memory and the many different ways the human body may store it (in genetics, neural pathways, in brain chemistry, muscle memory, etc). In order to locate the present consciousness you have to be able to track all of these memory systems to get a lock on to which active brain network shape may be the current instance of consciousness, which may at any time vanish and pop up in another network. Consciousness not being transient is kind of terrifying. It's like a mental version of 'The Prestige'. Every night when you lose consciousness, or maybe every time you lose or change a train of thought, 'you' essentially dies, and is cloned/re-imaged by your memories at some other location in the brain.
- cairo_x 7y ago
  DOH! Replace the word transient with continuous.

65 points by dnetesn 7y ago

The had problem of consciousness is related to neither neuroscience or physics, far from being a central problem in either. It's a central problem in philosophy.

jamesrcole 7y ago
How do you know it is unrelated to neuroscience? If you were to ask me whether I think neuroscience currently has any understanding of the hard problem of consciousness, I would say that I don't think they do. But it's still related to neuroscience.
robbrown451 7y ago
I notice that on the wikipedia page, an equal number of philosophers and cognitive neuroscientists are mentioned. For instance: "The existence of a "hard problem" is controversial. It has been accepted by philosophers of mind such as Joseph Levine, Colin McGinn, and Ned Block and cognitive neuroscientists such as Francisco Varela, Giulio Tononi, and Christof Koch. However, its existence is disputed by philosophers of mind such as Daniel Dennett, Massimo Pigliucci, and Keith Frankish and cognitive neuroscientists such as Stanislas Dehaene, Bernard Baars, and Antonio Damasio." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness
- whatshisface 7y ago
  If a neuroscientist had an opinion about who should get elected president this year, that would not make the presidential election a neurological issue.
  - SubiculumCode 7y ago
    If the a hard problem is real, then it is a neuroscience issue. If it does not exist, then the illusion of it is a neuroscience issue.
    - whatshisface 7y ago
      What if consciousness real but not a neuroscience issue? If you want a thought experiment to illustrate that, imagine a VR world where the inhabitants are connected in with headsets. Nothing inside the world will explain why it feels to everyone like experiences are being exported out of it.
      - robbrown451 7y ago
        "imagine a VR world" I don't see how this contributes any insights into the issue. How is that "world" any different from a real world experience, relevant to this issue? I mean, nothing in Disneyland's Pirates of the Caribbean ride explains "why it feels to everyone like experiences are being exported out of it" either.
        whatshisface 7y ago
        >nothing in Disneyland's Pirates of the Caribbean ride explains "why it feels to everyone like experiences are being exported out of it" either. Yeah, exactly. There's no way to tell if neuroscience is just the "Pirates of the Caribbean" ride through which something else is getting pulled through on boats. Is there any evidence one way or the other? What would evidence look like? I think it is beyond the reach of science because there is no experiment you could ever do that would illuminate it. Something that can only be resolved by discussing the options and choosing which one feels the most reasonable is philosophy, and not science.
      - chr1 7y ago
        In all cases it is a Math issue. Either there exists some effective computation that would produce behavior similar to the behavior of conscious being, and could be performed in VR world too, or computation would require exponential resources, or (in the most unlikely case) such computation would not exist, and it would be possible to show why it cannot exist. Neuroscience and Physics can help to find the rules for that computation. And Philosophy can have fun talking about what lies beyond unknown.
  - robbrown451 7y ago
    No, but that's not the point. The fact that many of them are quoted or referenced suggests that their opinions are relevant, at least to Wikipedia editors. Most other articles on the subject continually reference neuroscience and neuroscientists. Regardless, not everything fits into neat little boxes. I would personally be more interested in the views of a neuroscientist on the matter, but then again I'd expect them to be likely to dismiss it as not being a problem at all. I'd also be interested in the views of someone who works with AI and the like. Personally I think the problem will be "solved" as soon as we have sufficiently advanced conversational assistants and we just start assuming they are conscious because they seem like they are. I think having that sort of thing in our daily lives will dramatically change people's intuitive perspective on the issue.
    - whatshisface 7y ago
      >I would personally be more interested in the views of a neuroscientist on the matter, Some neuroscientists having an interesting take on the election does not imply that elections are a neurological topic. Philosophy is open to contributions from amateurs.
      - perl4ever 7y ago
        When and how did philosophy undergo professionalization? "Professionalization tends to result in establishing acceptable qualifications, one or more professional associations to recommend best practice and to oversee the conduct of members of the profession, and some degree of demarcation of the qualified from unqualified amateurs (that is, professional certification). It is also likely to create "occupational closure", closing the profession to entry from outsiders, amateurs and the unqualified."
        whatshisface 7y ago
        That's a huge question, but I think it happened in the 20th century during the academic boom.
- TheOtherHobbes 7y ago
  There aren't many problems that go away just by being declared not-hard - or in extremis, not-a-real-problem. Especially not by being declared not-a-real-problem by the problem itself.
erikerikson 7y ago
As the philosophers have it, all fields are subfields of philosophy. If this is so, the problem in neuroscience and physics is by definition the same problem (perhaps with different scopes) and included in philosophy. However, I'm not left feeling like I've gained any knowledge from recognizing this. It is so that it has been an important problem in philosophy but do you expect anyone to be surprised by that knowledge?
- oarabbus_ 7y ago
  >As the philosophers have it, all fields are subfields of philosophy. Seems a bit self-serving. Surely the physicists could make a claim that all fields (including philosophy) are subfields of physics.
  - evunveot 7y ago
    Is consciousness an emergent property of brains or are brains an emergent property of consciousness? That's the question.
  - naasking 7y ago
    No, because philosophy deals with any question, like "what is mathematics?", or "is there an objective standard for beauty?" which is completely outside the scope of physics. Physics is necessarily more limited as it's bound by the scientific process. In fact, the soundness of the scientific method itself is a philosophical argument, as it cannot be scientifically demonstrable without assuming the conclusion.
    - oarabbus_ 7y ago
      I've heard the challenge to that claim - a true GUT would explain all of those things, including any philosophical thought. Hence philosophy is a subset of physics.
      - naasking 7y ago
        No, a GUT cannot explain why we should believe the mathematics of a GUT.

russdill 7y ago

This seems to fall a bit under the Dyson's "lumpers and splitters" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lumpers_and_splitters https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lumpers_and_splitters

umvi 7y ago

Interestingly, solving the hard problem of consciousness could effectively prove whether or not God exists. Most Abrahamic religious teach that everybody has a "spirit" inside their body, and these spirits are somehow responsible for the experience of consciousness and controlling the body like a hand inside a glove. This is further reinforced by heavenly visitors in religious texts (i.e. Jesus talking to prophets before 0 B.C. in the Bible would indicate that a body-less spirit is indeed conscious). Proving that consciousness is a totally explainable phenomenon given our current understanding of physics would essentially prove that (at least the Abrahamic) God doesn't exist (i.e. if we could create conscious machines on-demand). On the other hand, proving that consciousness is the result of some previously undiscovered form/interaction of matter could provide evidence of the existence of "spirits" (i.e. if said "ethereal" matter exists in brain before, but not after, death)

piokoch 7y ago
No, in "Abrahamic" religions we don't have a "spirit". According to those religions people have immortal soul, which is definitely not a "spirit". The "spirit" thing inside people that might "be freed" and haunt some secluded house is something coming from the domain of cheap horror movies and pseudo science TV shows. By definition souls is not something measurable, it does not belong to physical world so no amount of physics or neurology can "explain it", prove it existence or nonexistence. (I am theoretical physics PhD and Roman Catholic).
- umvi 7y ago
  Not looking to argue here, but suffice to say, the Catholic view is not representative of all Abrahamic religions (or even just Christianity); I was trying to give as generic as possible an explanation that covers the jist of most Abrahamic faiths without diving into semantics of "spirit" vs. "soul" (which apparently can vary).
- ajna91 7y ago
  This is the Thomistic view, not the official Catholic view, no? Also, what about this verse? "For the word of God is living and operative and sharper than any two-edged sword, and piercing even to the dividing of soul and spirit and of joints and marrow, and able to discern the thoughts and intentions of the heart."

fennecfoxen 7y ago

The problem of consciousness is about understanding systems which feed back into themselves, build a model of themselves, and reason about themselves. The structure underneath is well known, if not perfectly understood. The problem of physics is that it’s not clear what the structure of reality is. It is not known in the slightest but it seems unlikely it has a connection to metacognition. Article connects these with a lame “software running on unknown hardware” analogy and works to suggest the universe could run on consciousness, or something incoherent like that. tldr article looks like it’s pretty much trash popsci; why is it even here? Kill it with fire ;)

jfengel 7y ago
Worse: popphil.
- fennecfoxen 7y ago
  "These two phenomenon have an important, fundamental connection: As laypeople, we don't understand anything about how either of them work." — works for either of them
cairo_x 7y ago
> The problem of consciousness is about understanding systems which feed back into themselves, build a model of themselves, and reason about themselves. The structure underneath is well known, if not perfectly understood. The problem is you could build a system that satisfies each of those states and we still couldn't prove if it had qualia or not. That is literally 'the hard problem'.

carapace 7y ago

Excellent article. You can't study consciousness directly in a lab but it's pretty easy to "merge" with others under the right conditions. For example, here's an old experiment with "mutual hypnosis": two people hypnotizing each other at the same time. "Psychedelic experiences associated with a novel hypnotic procedure, mutual hypnosis." Am J Clin Hypn. 1967 Oct;10(2):65-78. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/6080106 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/6080106 Anything which causes entrainment between two dynamic systems is essentially combining them into one dynamic system. E.g. something as simple as deliberately breathing in sync with each other can begin to develop consciousness merging.

smt88 7y ago
> "Psychedelic experiences associated with a novel hypnotic procedure, mutual hypnosis." Am J Clin Hypn. 1967 Oct;10(2):65-78. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/6080106* https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/6080106* Like much of Tart's other work "studying" the paranormal[1], this is pseudoscience. There is no good evidence for hypnosis. 1. http://skepdic.com/tart.html http://skepdic.com/tart.html
- carapace 7y ago
  Capital-S Skeptics are a strongly biased source, eh? > There is no good evidence for hypnosis. That's just ridiculous.
  - ci5er 7y ago
    > That's just ridiculous. Depends on your definition of 'hypnosis'. There are some pretty prosaic definitions that are clearly and repeatably demonstrable. There are also, at the other end of the spectrum, some pretty extraordinary claims for "what it is" and "what it can do". The former is riduculous, and for the latter, skepticism seems to be prudent, pending further articulation.
    - carapace 7y ago
      > Depends on your definition of 'hypnosis'. Well, yeah. The best book on hypnosis I know of opens with one of the co-authors stating that "there's no such thing as hypnosis" and the other stating "everything is hypnosis". > The former is ridiculous ... The "clearly and repeatably demonstrable" definitions are ridiculous?

evunveot 7y ago

The article talks about a philosophical concept called "dual-aspect monism" which, in the author's interpretation, basically means that everything we think of as physical/material has some kind of consciousness, and that our own consciousness emerges somehow from the interactions of the elementary consciousnesses of the particles in our brains. So consciousness is the hardware of reality and physical phenomena are the software, an inversion of the typical materialist view. (As a programmer, I'm not sure that metaphor really works, but I'll allow it.) The author presents this as an avenue for confronting the likelihood that even a perfect understanding/modeling of the physical characteristics of a brain is unlikely to reveal anything about consciousness or subjective experience itself. Seems plausible to me. Reality tends to make sense, so if it's most likely impossible to make sense of consciousness by studying the brain, there's probably some other way to look at it. The idea that fundamental particles like electrons have some kind of subjective experience was hard to swallow at first, but then I thought about my cat. It's safe to say that a cat's consciousness is more primitive than a typical human's. You can also say that cats (at least once you get to know them) are a lot more predictable than people and have a smaller set of possible behaviors and reactions. If my cat sees a bug on the wall, she's going to do her weird hiss-snarl thing at it just about 100% of the time, and there's 0% chance she's going to roll up a newspaper and swat it. If the consciousness of a particular entity can be ranked in comparison to that of other entities — like I would rank my consciousness as "higher" than my cat's — and if entities with "lower consciousnesses" have fewer possible behaviors or reactions to stimuli (like my cat compared to me, or a broccoli plant in my garden compared to my cat), then it's easy to imagine that something as elementary as an electron could be conscious in some way and still obey what appear to be totally deterministic rules. (Electron may have been a bad example since we can't really observe them like we can cats, but the point stands.) Another way to state it would be that as consciousness rises, so does free will (or, at least, scope of behavior). I'm also reminded of: John 1:1-3 (NKJV) — "In the beginning was the Word[0], and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through Him, and without Him nothing was made that was made." [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logos https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logos Of course, consciousness potentially being "the hardware of reality" doesn't necessarily mean God exists. But it fits.

7y ago

cairo_x 7y ago

Another difficulty of consciousness is it may not be transient. It may pop in and out of existence, and the only thing giving each instance the illusion of transience are the memories each previous instance have generated. The problem now is the fuzzy definition of a memory and the many different ways the human body may store it (in genetics, neural pathways, in brain chemistry, muscle memory, etc). In order to locate the present consciousness you have to be able to track all of these memory systems to get a lock on to which active brain network shape may be the current instance of consciousness, which may at any time vanish and pop up in another network. Consciousness not being transient is kind of terrifying. It's like a mental version of 'The Prestige'. Every night when you lose consciousness, or maybe every time you lose or change a train of thought, 'you' essentially dies, and is cloned/re-imaged by your memories at some other location in the brain.

cairo_x 7y ago
DOH! Replace the word transient with continuous.