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You are conflating consciousness[1] with self-awareness[2]. They are two distinct ideas. In fact the second/third sentence on the Wikipedia page for self-aware

• breckinloggins 6y ago
  Exactly. One of my more vivid memories is excitedly opening my copy of Jayne's "The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind" and being dismayed as it slowly dawned on me that Jayne's entire book was based on this category error. For the life of me I can't understand why people don't understand this distinction (or choose to ignore it). I can only assume that people ignore the very obvious "magical thing" that is happening in their own heads due to ideological commitments to physicalism or something.
  • skosch 6y ago
    Is physicalism the problem? My understanding is that physicalism is still in good standing – at least when it comes to the conscious experience of qualia. (The concept-of-self encoding obviously doesn't require a physical substrate.)
    • breckinloggins 6y ago
      Probably not, but I mean the kind of informal physicalist commitment that says something like "if I can't imagine quantum fields feeling things, then feelings don't exist." I see a lot of that, though less and less these days. I think Chalmers helped clear the air a bit here, though I don't think jumping straight to panpsychism is particularly helpful to the discourse, either.
    • chongli 6y ago
      The problem is that physics is not the right level of abstraction and that we do not have an operational theory for working at the right level. I suppose it's also a problem that we can't seem to agree on the definition of consciousness. Anyway, trying to understand consciousness by applying physics is just as silly as trying to understand why your complex fluid dynamics simulation is giving an incorrect result by peering at the CPU's transistors with an electron microscope: it's the wrong level of abstraction. One thing that seems to be making our task a lot more difficult is that evolution doesn't even try to design the biology of systems with clean abstraction boundaries that we can understand. There are so many strange things going on in our bodies that we can barely describe them, never mind understand them. One example is what happens when a person consumes Ayahuasca [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ayahuasca https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ayahuasca
  • tasty_freeze 6y ago
    What is this magical thing that is so obvious to you? Something may seem magical without being magical. To the person who survives a tornado while all his neighbors die, the sense they were chosen to live and have a special purpose can be compelling, but is false. Materialism can't explain everything, but there is yet to be any proof that magic explains anything. Lacking that, assuming a physical basis as the explanation is prudent.
    • dr_dshiv 6y ago
      "assuming a physical basis as explanation is prudent" yeah, good luck making physicality relevant for most explanations. My wife asks why I didn't put the laundry away, for instance. "Physics!" I declare triumphantly. Now, if I put music on and rub her back a bit... Well, ha! There's the magic, my good sir. Imagine walking into a film studio with the idea of film production based exclusively on the principles of physics. No. Magic and physics are no more opposed than biology and physics. When hidden (psychological?) forces clearly underlie economically valuable phenomena (architecture, music, media, etc) respecting the magic is closer to the truth than reducing it to physics. Physics just isn't the right explanatory level. If you'd like to learn more about definitions of magic that aren't "phenomena that don't actually exist", I recommend Penelope Gouk's work on music, science and natural magic in the 17th century. It's about the magic involved at the formation of the Royal Society.
      • Koshkin 6y ago
        physicality n. obsession with physical urges On the subject, you are making a good point comparing social behavior with mental activity. Just like there is no “magic” in the way people interact with each other, there is no magic in how neurons do the same.
        • dr_dshiv 6y ago
          > Just like there is no “magic” in the way people interact with each other, there is no magic in how neurons do the same. Except I am arguing that there is most definitely magic in human interaction.
  • cscurmudgeon 6y ago
    > I can only assume that people ignore the very obvious "magical thing" that is happening in their own heads due to ideological commitments to physicalism or something. You nailed it. People think that accepting consciousness is hard is giving into religion. It need not be that way.
  • Koshkin 6y ago
    It was said elsewhere that a sufficiently advanced “something” is indeed indistinguishable from magic.
  • justincredible 6y ago
    Tide goes in, tide goes out. Never a miscommunication; you can't explain that.
  • carapace 6y ago
    After thinking about it for many years I've come to the conclusion that some people really haven't noticed themselves, (e.g. I think Daniel Dennett is a p-zombie!)
    • vladTheInhaler 6y ago
      I know it was an incidental point, but it sounds like you don't think very highly of Dennett. What specifically don't you like?
      • carapace 6y ago
        Oh no, I do not mean that in a pejorative sense. I have a lot of respect for him and his work. It's a way to understand how someone so thoughtful and intelligent and dedicated can seemingly be unaware of the "hard problem". One day it occurred to me that maybe he just hadn't had the "breakthrough" or "epiphany". It's unlikely but not impossible. FWIW, his wikipedia entry says, > He also presents an argument against qualia; he argues that the concept is so confused that it cannot be put to any use or understood in any non-contradictory way, and therefore does not constitute a valid refutation of physicalism. His strategy mirrors his teacher Ryle's approach of redefining first person phenomena in third person terms, and denying the coherence of the concepts which this approach struggles with. that's specifically what I don't like. In re: the "hard problem" he wants to declare victory without a fight, or a prize.
• joe_the_user 6y ago
  That's the position of philosophy on the philosophical view of consciousness. The broad, intuitive notion of consciousness often does equate it with self-awareness, indeed in the conscious link you have: "Today, with modern research into the brain it often includes any kind of experience, cognition, feeling or perception. It may be 'awareness', or 'awareness of awareness', or self-awareness." Etc. I'm more of a fan of this view than the specifically philosophical view of consciousness. This latter sort axiomatizes, pares-down, an intuition that is, itself, so vague that axiomatized version winds up not having any definite qualities or characteristics, just "I know I experience it".
  • goatlover 6y ago
    Colors, tastes, feelings aren't vague nor are the thoughts, imaginations, dreams they makeup. They're the stuff of consciousness, and somehow you have to demonstrate how awareness results in those experiences. Shifting definitions to avoid the hard problem doesn't cut it.
    • barrkel 6y ago
      You have no idea if you live in a world of zombies who just say they perceive qualia, who just give the appearance of seeing red. I don't see it as a real problem. If a program or machine asserts that it perceives qualia, who are we to argue it's wrong? We are in no better a position to prove the qualia of our subjective conscious experience other than our physical resemblance to our interlocutor. Maybe qualia is what it's like for matter to be in a feedback loop with physical interaction. Panpsychism is pretty much my position.
      • deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
      • Xenograph 6y ago
        > I don't see it as a real problem. If a program or machine asserts that it perceives qualia, who are we to argue it's wrong? Right now, we are in no position to argue it's wrong, because we have no accepted framework for understanding qualia. That said, we can still make some simple assertions with confidence such as: 1: A one-line program which prints "I am afraid" does not experience fear qualia. 2: A human being which utters the words "I am afraid" may be experiencing fear qualia (and thus perhaps experiencing pain/suffering). If you assert that the world is full of philosophical zombies rather than humans like yourself, you may not agree with assertion #2. But we build our ethical and legal frameworks around the idea that we aren't philosophical zombies, rather, that we have feelings and want to avoid suffering. Once you start talking about more complicated programs, though, we don't know what the right assertions are. We don't have an understanding of what things can suffer and what things cannot, for starters. We generally agree that, say, dogs can suffer. That's why we have laws against animal abuse. But what about programs? It is absolutely a real problem, because some day we will have to build laws and culture around how we treat AI. Whether or not an AI can suffer (ie. by experiencing qualia that can be considered undesirable) will likely affect how we treat that AI. If we have no way to answer "can this program suffer?", then we are setting ourselves up for regret.
• AgentME 6y ago
  Is this distinction necessary or strictly proven? They seem pretty linked in my personal experience. (All the times I'm not conscious, like when I'm sleeping, I'm not self-aware, and vice-versa. Intuitively it seems like anything that might put me into a semi-conscious state would be considered as also putting me into a semi-self-aware state and vice-versa.) The page lists several disorders related to self-awareness, but I don't think any of them represent anything like "0% self-awareness yet 100% consciousness" which would have more strongly implied that they may be different things. The page lists several types of self-awareness, including "introspective self-awareness". Maybe what we call consciousness is just the internal experience of something with introspective self-awareness. This does raise the question of what "internal experience" is though. I think "internal experience" is what some people mean by "consciousness", especially when they say things like "maybe everything has consciousness including rocks or random grids of transistors". I think there exists some sense of "what it is like to be a rock", but it's an utterly empty experience without memory, perception, personality, emotions, or the feeling of weighing choices; something very close to the "null experience", that is an experience in the same sense that zero or a number utterly close to zero is still a number. The internal experience of a random grid of transistors only just barely starts to touch a sliver of what a human's internal experience consists of. The internal experience of a worm starts to have a few recognizable qualities (proprioception, the drive to maintain personal needs), but it still lacks many large aspects of a human's internal experience. (Maybe a thermostat with sufficiently rich inputs, output control, world model, and juggled priorities has an internal experience similar to a worm.) Large animals tend to have more elements of awareness (including memory, social awareness, and some introspective awareness) that bring their internal experience closer to having what feels like the necessary elements to human consciousness.
  • hoseja 6y ago
    I'd say you're off. I'd describe the experience of the worm much in the same way you're describing the experience of a rock, just a couple biochemical circuits. And the experience of the rock would be even more atomically null to compensate.
    • AgentME 6y ago
• agency 6y ago
  You act like these are well defined and agreed upon categories. The page on consciousness you link lists off many different definitions people attribute to consciousness, including: "It may be 'awareness', or 'awareness of awareness', or self-awareness."
• charliemil4 6y ago
  I forget who said it - and it's probably somewhere tucked in these comments, but paraphrasing... If one were to simulate every drop of rain, gust of wind, and tidal current of a hurricane, to ultimate perfection, would you say the processor is wet?
  • neuralzen 6y ago
    This is the "Mary's Room" thought experiment which explores the nature of qualia. - The CPU analogy is a nice one though!
  • taneq 6y ago
    Well, no, but you'd say the simulated environment absolutely is wet.
• gbjw 6y ago
  Right -- consciousness is whatever it is that is aware that it is self-aware. In fact, anytime you pinpoint consciousness as any particular awareness, you beg the question. How can you be aware of your awareness?
  • ryukafalz 6y ago
    If your brain has a computational process for awareness, and it has itself somewhere in the inputs... that’d make you aware of your awareness, no? It’s recursion!
    • gbjw 6y ago
      The only way to build a recursive loop is to say that awareness is some state (the output of the awareness process). But that just begs the question, how could awareness be a state? If it is a meta-phenomena (i.e., the result of some sort of complexity or self-referential loop) then what exactly is aware that one is aware?
• mapcars 6y ago
  >You are conflating consciousness[1] with self-awareness[2]. They are two distinct ideas. Consciousness is not an idea and ones who experienced a little bit of it (via meditation or some chemicals or other ways) will laugh at all attempts philosophers and scientists are doing to define it. Simply because you can only define something which you can observe from aside, but here there is no outside, everything is inside it. How can you possibly define that? :D
• mannykannot 6y ago
  Self-aware consciousness is where it gets interesting, in a way that debating the consciousness of toasters and such just cannot match.