21 ms·

Honestly, as weird as it might sound, to me it's even weirder to claim that consciousness somehow is just a manifestation of effect that we are already familiar

• Madmallard 6y ago
  I see absolutely no evidence or suggestion that consciousness is anything else other than the summation of changes that happened in our brain in combination with the input devices we naturally have. You have decades worth of changes that occurred to get you to the point now and it's very clear and easy to see how much _less_ conscious you were when you were younger.
  • pontus 6y ago
    I agree that consciousness is correlated with this, but having a lot of experiences over years does not explain to me why I feel things. Similarly I can definitely see how there would be a mechanistic explanation for intelligence (basically just build a machine that acts intelligently, perhaps even claiming that it's conscious), but there's a distinction between appearing conscious and actually feeling something.
    • Madmallard 6y ago
      Good luck getting to the roots of all your feelings when they can be based on any number of inputs and changes over who knows how long of a time.
    • mgamache 6y ago
      The subjective feeling is just a brain state. The ‘why’ is due to whatever circumstances resulted in that brain state.
      • zozbot234 6y ago
        But one can definitely ask how something seemingly as complex as a "brain state" can be directly experienced as phenomenology. How is it that we can so easily describe some things about our brain states, that we'd never realize by physically looking at what brains do and how they behave. That's the "hard problem" of conciousness stated simply, and the answer to it would seemingly have to involve some quite direct access to some part of brain state physics - meaning that the physical properties involved are quite "basic" in some sense.
        • wvenable 6y ago
          > How is it that we can so easily describe some things about our brain states, that we'd never realize by physically looking at what brains do and how they behave. As a software developer, this should be simple. Programs have their own state that you can understand without knowing the exact formulations of electrons in the processor that ultimately make up that state. X = 5 sure but good luck figuring that out looking at the motherboard of a running computer.
      • goatlover 6y ago
        So why are some brain states conscious and not others?
        • mannykannot 6y ago
          There is no reason to expect that the self-aware conscious mind has full access to everything that is going on in the brain. In fact, from both an evolutionary and systems perspective, that would be extremely surprising.
  • ars 6y ago
    A sleepwalker is not conscious, yet you can converse with them, ask them questions, get answers, you can tell them to do things. In every external way they appear conscious, yet they are not. They are not aware of their own existence. So consciousness is clearly more complicated than just "summation of changes that happened in our brain", there is something extra there, that we don't understand.
    • wvenable 6y ago
      Perhaps they're simply not forming memories of their own existence. Can you ask a particular sleepwalker their own name and get answer? That might imply awareness of their own existence. It seems most people want to make consciousness out to be more complicated in some way.
    • Madmallard 6y ago
      Ever heard of amnesia? Works the same way.
• Retric 6y ago
  Consciousness seems like it should be special, but that’s not evidence that it is. Consider, after a lifetime of subjective experiences from exercise etc, a cardiac surgeon can still know far more about your heart than you do. Nobody is arguing some mysterious force is pumping blood through their bodies, but the feeling of blood pumping through your veins somehow feels primal not simple plumbing. You can intellectually extend that to everyone else about our bodies, so why not consciousness?
  • pontus 6y ago
    Understanding how a brain works may only require a mechanistic model, but consciousness is different. Consider the following thought experiment: suppose that we had a complete understanding of how neurons work (as well as the brain more broadly). I think this is totally reasonable. Then suppose that we created artificial neurons that acted identically to biological neurons. If we replaced the neurons of a brain with these manufactured neurons, I would imagine that the resulting brain would still be conscious. Now imagine taking some of these neurons and removing their interior structure instead routing the inputs / outputs to a machine somewhere else where the correct computation takes place in order to determine the output from the neuron. From the rest of the brain's perspective nothing has changed so presumably it's still conscious. Now take this to the extreme: replace all of these neurons with empty shells and route the computation to a billion people in the world to perform on pen and paper. Is it still conscious? If so, what if you removed the brain altogether and just performed the computations directly on paper, is the paper conscious? The paper would definiy still be intelligent, it would possibly come up with interesting inventions, claim that it was sad or happy etc, but would it actually be sad?
    • Analemma_ 6y ago
      Sure, why not? That's literally what the materialist definition of consciousness means: it's a process that can be carried out on any appropriately-configured physical substrate; ours just happens to be neurons.
      • a_wild_dandan 6y ago
• badrabbit 6y ago
  That's traditionally called a soul.
• sitkack 6y ago
  Big corporations have a mind, but they aren't conscious in the way we are conscious. Lot more minds exist in the world than consciousness.
  • Barrin92 6y ago
    this is actually one of the problems I have with the theory that everything is conscious. The electron, like the company, is actually an abstraction and part of a model. We don't even really know if an electron is 'a thing in itself'. Maybe everything is just strings or quarks, or some other smaller particle or just the manifestation of some field (sorry I'm not a physicist in case I'm butchering the analogy). Even every individual human could be said to be some sort of zoo of 'conciousnesses'. Panspychism posits that consciousness is essentially smeered across the universe like a sort of paste, and if consciousness applies down the ladder I don't see why it doesn't apply upwards.
    • libertine 6y ago
      I think what you're lacking, if I recall correctly about panpsychism, is that only self-organized systems are conscious - not everything. A computer, birds nest, a gun, a space ship: such things aren't self organized, therefore not conscious. A cluster of cells, a planet, a star system, a galaxy, they are self organized therefore, permeated by consciousness.
    • loopz 6y ago
      Everything is conscious and nothing is conscious, are equally valid as hypothesis. Who is it, that is trying to establish a definitive answer to something unanswerable?
• hackinthebochs 6y ago
  >Saying things like "Consciousness is emergent" or "Consciousness is just a side effect of information processing" seems to miss the point. On the contrary, I feel like those who think we need some fundamental consciousness property is missing the point. We expect to find some objective third-person property that is the substrate of consciousness because a phenomenon that seems so unlike every other property should have a fundamental basis. But the mistake is expecting to analyze consciousness in the same way we can analyze other objective properties of physics. The only things we know to be conscious are complex macro-scale objects with highly complex and rare internal organizations. In fact, the only things we truly know to be conscious are ourselves. It seems to be fundamentally subjective; it is not something to be directly witnessed as a third-person observer. So our investigation should start there. What we want is a theory for deriving organizational subjectivity from a non-subjective substrate. What might this look like? A system with subjectivity will need to recognize the external from the internal. It needs an egocentric mode of representation with the ability to represent itself and its dispositions and intentional stances, as well as states to represent the external world. My intuition tells me such a system has a non-zero "inner life", i.e. there is something it is like to be it. But I see no reason to think "fundamental" subjectivity, whatever that is, could do any explanatory work here. The causal and representative power is in the organization.
  • edna314 6y ago
    It’s even worse: How can you be sure that you can separate the internal from the external? Both seem to have to be present in order to make sense of anything.
    • loopz 6y ago
      So, in a sense, everything is connected to everything else? What do you call that, hmm? ;) This is an existential and observational query, not about industrial optimizations (ie. what works). What works is killing us!
  • jbotz 6y ago
    Indeed. I think IIT is a good theory... of something, just not exactly consciousness. Maybe a precondition to consciousness or something like that. But the thing that we think of as our consciousness is to me best explained by the "global workspace" theory, which says consciousness is the process of the various specialized parts of the mind, which are constantly working separately and in parallel, communicating their state to each other. It's like a boardroom for the society of mind, where at any point one subsystem has the podium (although there is lots of chatter and crosstalk as well). For most of us a part of the language subsystem (Gazzaniga's "interpreter") is also giving a running commentary (the internal monolog) of the information it's receiving from the other parts (with a lot of its own interpretation thrown in)... but this is not an essential feature of consciousness! We have a tendency to identify our consciousness with this commentary, but that is obviously incorrect. I think that the communication in this global workspace occurs in its own "language", a language internal to organic brains, capable of abstracting and reducing to its barest essence information from any of its components. This view of consciousness is phenomenologically best aligned with most of the (admittedly limited) objective information we have about human conscious experience, and is consistent with the experience of various altered states of consciousness such as meditation or the use of entheogenic substances. It explains how consciousness is only a small part of what happens in our mind and why the nature of the subconscious (which is most of what actually happens in the brain) seems to be so hard to nail down. It also means that any being with a "mind" that has numerous independent and parallel processes that need to be coordinated has some measure of conscious experience, even invertebrates, and probably even living things whose information processing uses an entirely different infrastructure, such as plants. However, I can't see any way that this definition of consciousness could apply to an electron. Edit: I think that the global workspace theory of consciousness can probably be mathematically described by IIT, but not just any integration of information results in something that deserves to be called consciouness. The information that's being integrated should be combination of perceptions (feedback from the environment) with some kind of memories of previous states, resulting in new memories and predictions, and the integration should happen through independent pre-processing of this information by relatively independent subsystems. This is still general enough to apply to nearly everything living, but I think it puts conscious experience at a higher level than merely integrating information.
• dleslie 6y ago
  Worth considering, I believe, is that many people do not have an inner voice. For those of us who have conversations with ourselves, who can explore our consciousness throug dialog, it is easy to assume that all humans can do this. Many cannot. Many have no internal voice. I find many folks are asking "where does my internal voice come from," and yet many conscious individuals lack it. "I think, therefor I am" has a different meaning when that question cannot be asked through internal monologue. For myself, the concept that consciousness is an emergent and mechanical outcome became easier to accept after considering consciousness without monologue.
• knzhou 6y ago
  > Saying things like "Consciousness is emergent" or "Consciousness is just a side effect of information processing" seems to miss the point. It sounds suspect to me too, but the reason the idea is appealing is that it's worked fantastically for hundreds of similar phenomena. To vastly oversimplify thousands of years of philosophy, for most of human history the default position has been that every idea had to be reified into some metaphysical essence. What is the essence that makes a dog a dog? That makes bread nourishing but rocks not? That makes rocks solid? That makes fire hot? That makes falling objects seek Earth? Again and again, we've found simple physical explanations for these puzzles, that once were regarded as just as inexplicable as consciousness. Indeed, consciousness is now the last essence that survives, and that's why some bet it'll go the same way as all the rest. "But this one is different", indeed, and every single time so far that argument has been wrong.
  • pontus 6y ago
    My background is in theoretical physics, so I absolutely subscribe to this perspective. In understanding my own consciousness, however, I find it a lot harder to see how such an explanation could work. The only other problem that I feel may require a similarly "out-there" explanation would be the measurement problem in quantum mechanics. Why is it that a macroscopic object, made entirely of electrons, protons, etc. when interacting with an electron means that a measurement occurs, but somehow when a single electron interacts with that same electron we can just use the Schrödinger equation? The existence of some type of cutoff between macroscopic and microscopic seems to me to suffer from inevitable inconsistencies. More likely, I would think, is that something like the many worlds interpretation is correct. Similarly, I wouldn't be surprised if something similar will happen when we understand consciousness more deeply. Simply saying that it's an emergent property is sort of cheating and discounting how different the sense of experience is from anything else that we have seen in nature.
    • youareostriches 6y ago
      We can imagine consciousness as a purely informational process, which can occur in any adequately complex substrate—real or virtual. In this regard (integrated information theory), the inherent “properties” of consciousness would be more readily described using graph theory or topology. However, we can also view physics itself as something inherently informational, given that all the base particles in the standard model can ultimately be boiled down to scalar values. Would it be possible to say that those values are ultimately derived from the inherently mathematical properties which result in this reality “existing”? What does it mean for something to exist on the basis of its inherent mathematical identity? If both consciousness and reality are purely mathematical phenomenon (maybe consciousness is more derived through the computation-generating properties of life), why would one such phenomenon be any less expected than the other? Isn’t it impossible for a non-mathematically-derived (informational) consciousness to exist at all in such a universe?
• nvrspyx 6y ago
  As much as I'd like to believe that consciousness is unique, I don't think we have to look that far to show otherwise. There's an abundance of mental disorders that affect consciousness. Take for example something as (relatively) mundane as ADHD. Anyone with it that has a reasonable amount of insight will tell you that they are almost entirely driven by attention, which is the crux of ADHD. I'd argue that "consciousness" is the illusion that's created from attention, which you're ultimately a slave to. While I don't have empirical evidence, considering how difficult it would be, I believe that attention is the heart of what we consider consciousness. What your attention focuses on is built on nature and nurture. Your attention is grabbed by what you're "interested" in and what you deem is important. It guides your thoughts, your perception, your internal representations, your attitude, your decisions, etc. The illusion is that you have control over your attention. Again, anyone with ADHD and insight will conclude that you don't. If your mind will is a computer, then attention is the cursor that guides interactions with it. However, we're not in "control" of it since basically what we know of as the self is the mouse cursor of the mind. I don't think we move the mouse; I think that's the illusion. Me typing this is simply a product of my attention and it leading me to the conclusion that I should type this because this topic and the representations I've constructed internally are significant to me as a result of my education, life experiences, genetics, etc. At least, that's my opinion. I definitely don't want to come off as an authority on consciousness. I don't think anyone is (yet). Despite my view, I do believe we can uncover the mystery of consciousness from mere perseverance, even if consciousness is emergent. --- Someone has already proposed a thought experiment, but I propose an alternative. Imagine all humans (and living creatures in general) as cells and neurons of an even greater being. What if what we understand as the universe is actually just the composition of a larger mind? As cells, would we comprehend or know that? Or would we assume we're independent beings? The infrastructure we build, the roads connecting clumps of societies, the internet connecting all humans together, etc. Who is to say that we're not simply building more complicated versions of what we would consider synapses between neurons, nervous systems, circulatory systems, etc? Perhaps the progression of humanity, and the universe at large, is actually just a small organ during the gestation or development phase of a much larger being and we are completely unaware? One notion that comes to mind is fractals. We see it everywhere in nature. What if consciousness does emerge from complexity and what we consider reality is just a single resolution of a much more complex and larger fractal?
• SideburnsOfDoom 6y ago
  > but claiming that it is fully explainable in some mechanistic way sounds suspect to me. What's the alternative? If it's not "fully explainable in some mechanistic way" then you need a mystical component to the explanation? That is itself suspect, exceedingly suspect, to many people.
  • TheOtherHobbes 6y ago
    The alternative is that current metaphors are wrong and new metaphors are needed.
    • SideburnsOfDoom 6y ago
      Will those new metaphors be "some mechanistic way" or not? Proposing new mechanisms is all fine and well, But mixing in mysticism, and you lose respect from all of science.
• qwerty456127 6y ago
  I absolutely agree, to the point of considering almost any materialistic (as well as theological) debate about consciousnesses pointless. Just for fun, however: what if consciousness actually is just a manifestation of mass? (I've in fact heard a hypotheses it's a manifestation of gravity) Just trying to imagine consciousness of a mountain exceeding that of my own by orders of magnitude is an interesting experience. I imply that a consciousnesses of a different order does not necessarily has a function of acting or communicating in a way we could consider conscious.
• vl 6y ago
  The answer, of course, is that there is no consciousness: if you try to precisely define what consciousness is, you’ll end up with increasingly absurd “you know when you see it” kinds of definitions. Objectively there is no any “special” consciousness, it’s just information processing systems, simple or complex.
  • coldtea 6y ago
    >The answer, of course, is that there is no consciousness: if you try to precisely define what consciousness is, you’ll end up with increasingly absurd “you know when you see it” kinds of definition There's nothing absurd about “you know when you see it”. Those are just things we don't have (or can't have, or don't yet have) good definitions for, but do exist. "Family resemblance" [1] classes of things are often like that. "What is a game", is a classical example. Any definition you can give can be violated, including "having a goal", or "not having real impact" etc. And yet we know a game when we see one. And there's lots of other such distinctions. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_resemblance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_resemblance
    • vl 6y ago
      While such definitions are good for casual conversation, they are not good for scientific discussion. Or you end up with nonsense like “my doorknob has consciousness“, well, lets define what consciousness is first. With “consciousness” in particular having good definition became important since there are a lot of discussions about “is AI conscious?” which might in the future dictate policy decisions.
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  • visarga 6y ago
    Let me try an easy definition: consciousness is that which makes you get out of bed in the morning and get something to eat. Life is a series of experiences and choices and something needs to make those choices in such a way as to continue life. If it weren't for consciousness your body would not survive, or grow to adult size, or reproduce. Of course, 'get something to eat' sounds simpler than it is in reality - you would need to be able to see, walk, grasp, understand the environment and objects at your disposal, shop, cook, earn money, be a functioning member of society - the whole bag.
• GoblinSlayer 6y ago
  You're not even wrong, it's logically impossible to derive temperature from velocity either because temperature is defined as a fundamental attribute of matter. You can only quantitatively connect them, and such connection is seen as explanation in mechanistic way.
• comboy 6y ago
  For anyone interested in this kind of ponderings I strongly recommend Consciousness Explained by Daniel Dennett. It may be the best book I've ever read.
• dTal 6y ago
  Is consciousness is not emergent from something - not "fully explainable in some mechanistic way" - what type of explanation for it would satisfy you? If you're not willing to brook the idea of breaking it into smaller components, then you've abdicated understanding it all - it's just an ineffable feature of the universe we'll have to live with, some shadow of the spirit world that has zero effect on any physics calculation. That seems weird to me, and lazy to boot.
  • pontus 6y ago
    I don't know, that's the problem :) Btw, I would imagine that our experience of consciousness is emergent from something else, but the question is what that something else is. Is it nothing more than mass, charge etc. or is it something else?
    • visarga 6y ago
      > Is it nothing more than mass, charge etc. or is it something else? It's more like chairs, beds, phones, cars and people. Consciousness is emergent from the environment. We learn to interpret visual stimulus by seeing, we learn to interpret sound by hearing, we learn how to relate to the world by being in the world and having consequences to our actions. Our brains grow on the rich sensations they receive from the body, world and the other people. Looking for the mystery of consciousness inside the brain is a mistake, we should look at the whole game instead. The brain is just doing the learning and acting part, but the game is much more.
• rixed 6y ago
  The difference is that charge, spin etc have their own effects/manifestations, whereas consciousness does not cause anything.
• jdmichal 6y ago
  I'm personally a fan of attention schema theory. It's based on the idea that consciousness emerges from an advancing capability to create models of both the external and internal world. For me, it scratches a couple itches. First, it's not an all-or-nothing evolutionary gamble, but develops in steps and each step has advantages. Second, it seems pretty well rooted in neuroscience and psychology, rather than relying on handwaves like "all matter has consciousness". Here's a couple articles from Michael Graziano, the founder (discoverer? namer?): https://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/12/opinion/sunday/are-we-really-conscious.html https://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/12/opinion/sunday/are-we-rea... https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/06/how-consciousness-evolved/485558/ https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/06/how-cons...
• ajuc 6y ago
  We all know what a forest is. But there is no "particle of forestness". Most of the words we use don't need laws of physics and particles exclusive for them. What makes you think consciousness is more like electromagnetism than it is like a forest? In my opinion consciousness is just an abstraction, like a football match or a forest. We have a word for these common configurations of matter, but it doesn't mean that they are fundamentally, qualitatively different from the rest of the universe. Show me an elementary particle of forest then I can admit that consciousness needs one too :)
  • visarga 6y ago
    Consciousness is not just an abstraction, requires self replication/evolution and ability to create models of self and environment - both being extraordinary feats. A perceptive self replicator existing inside a multi-agent environment that affords both cooperation and competition, and who's existence depends on its ability to adapt and act well - this configuration is what creates consciousness in my opinion. There is no particle or fundamental quality of consciousness, but it is what self replication under limited resources leads to.
• codeulike 6y ago
  Saying consciousness is emergent is definitely weird, but the problem is, so are all the other possible explanations. If you're trying to avoid supernatural explanations then emergence is the best of a baffling bad bunch IMHO. (Then I would back this up a bit with "once you start investigating it, a lot of aspects of consciousness are quite different to what people would intuitively expect" and that makes it all a bit more feasible. E.g. saccades and the fovea are fascinating and counterintuitive, what else are we getting wrong?)
  • vikramkr 6y ago
    Is it though? Until we have more information, all these explanations are equally unsubstantiated. If you're speculating without the data and I sight needed to actually understand it, then the proposal isn't any better because it feels less supernatural. The actual explanation will probably seem really weird and supernatural to us now since we dont have the data and experiments to understand it. Today, quantum tunneling is still weird, still hard to wrap your mind around, but it's a phenomenon that we understand well enough to work with. We try to avoid it when making a CPU, try to make it happen when we use a scanning tunneling microscope. But 250 years ago trying to explain how a scanning tunneling microscope that just appeared into the world would have seemed impossible without invoking some supernatural sounding explanation. We have consciousness, we dont know where it came from yet, maybe there's a consciousness field we'll find when we figure out how to unite gravity and quantum mechanics, maybe theres an emergent property we'll understand once we can map a brain's functions and do some data science on it, maybe there's some explanation that we cant even imagine yet, but until there's data none are less supernatural than the others
  • visarga 6y ago
    > If you're trying to avoid supernatural explanations then emergence is the best of a baffling bad bunch IMHO. Emergence is a general word, too general. I think what we need here is just self-replication. Self replication leads to competition, which given enough time leads to the evolution of perception and ultimately reasoning.
• gen220 6y ago
  Only responding to a tiny piece of your very good comment. In the Maier/Rechtin book on system design, they spend a few pages talking about the word “Emergent”, and how “weak” it is. They says that we use the word to denote things that are almost certainly explainable, but for which we do not yet understand the mechanism of its behavior. They use (iirc) the example of a black box system that produces a whistle noise at seemingly random moments, which observers interpret as “emergent” when reality reveals itself on closer inspection. Their point is essentially that the description “emergent” is a cop-out, and that so far nothing we’ve described as “emergent” has actually turned out to be inexplicable. I often hear smart people saying things like “consciousness is just an emergent feature of our brains”, in a way that seems to imply “that’s that”, when in fact it’s not an explanation but rather an admission of ignorance. Admitting ignorance is fine, but ignorance is not an explanation. I personally don’t think we’ll understand the mechanisms that underpin consciousness within our lifetimes, but I certainly don’t think consciousness is inexplicable.
  • mannykannot 6y ago
    "Emergence" can certainly be abused in this way, but it is nevertheless a real, useful and important concept. Take Darwin's theory of evolution, for example. Evolution is an emergent theory in that a purely reductivist approach to biology will not find a particle or field of evolution. This does not mean either that biology is inexplicable by physics, or that evolution is pseudo-science.
    • gen220 6y ago
      In your example, I don't think that "Evolution" matches the popular definition of "emergent properties" (i.e. properties that lack concrete explanations). Evolution is natural selection (a well-understood mechanism) applied over time. The divergence of species, families, and genuses "emerges" over time, but I think we're agreeing that this is a different use of the word. To be clear, I'm not saying that words like "emergence" have no use, I'm just recommending that we be careful using them, lest we devolve to being satisfied by increasingly hand-wavy ideas. In situations where we're aware of our own ignorance, we should own up to the ignorance directly, instead of describing the systems as having "emergent" (i.e. tautological) properties.