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It seems unlikely to me that consciousness wouldn't be tied to intelligence. If consciousness had no direct involvement with intelligence, there would be no rea

It seems unlikely to me that consciousness wouldn't be tied to intelligence. If consciousness had no direct involvement with intelligence, there would be no reason for pain to hurt or pleasure to feel good. An irrelevant consciousness could present as anything at all, but we have one that presents us with a coherent reality that at least resembles the one our bodies exist in. It must be either a side effect of intelligence or something that human intelligence uses to an end. Either consciousness is something composed of information processing, or it is something inherent to the universe that has some evolutionarily efficient use towards information processing. I favor the former. I believe this very strongly. That said, the subject matter is a personal obsession, and I would love to hear counterpoints.

WClayFerguson 6y ago
I agree intelligence emerges from consciousness, but not the other way around. I define intelligence as the ability to use experiences and memories to construct useful mental models that can be used to predict the future based on the past, solve problems, discover correlations between patterns, and things like that. So intelligence uses memories as it's building blocks for recombining and recognizing patterns, but as you'll see in a nearby reply in this comment thread by me, I have a theory about memory which is that it's not "stored" but your brain accesses essentially the 'actual' event thru spacetime, and that the 'accessing' of these past events and merging those 'wave-forms' and entangling them with the present brain state, is what we call consciousness, regardless of whether any intelligent processing is happening.
amarte 6y ago
I've heard consciousness described as "the felt presence of immediate experience," which I've found to be an excellent description of the experience of being embodied in the world -- of being conscious. If consciousness is an emergent phenomenon, meaning if there are atoms flying around spontaneously assembling into more and more complex forms of order until some critical point of complexity is reached and consciousness appears, what's the point of "being conscious" at all? If the assembling of particles into forms of order is what's fundamental, surely that process could just go on and on without any bit of it feeling embodied. It seems to me like the universe could be exactly the same without "the felt presence of immediate experience"/consciousness. Atoms would be whizzing around, people would be pontificating, GPT-3 would be chugging away. It would all just be kind of "empty" -- all surface no substance. I don't need to feel embodied for the world to be the way it is, yet I do, and I struggle to understand why that is.
- Stupulous 6y ago
  This is a question I've considered for a long while. As programmers we can easily see that no set of behaviours require consciousness. I touched on this in my previous comment, it is my belief that consciousness is not the only way that intelligence can be made, but that it is somehow efficient for the purposes of evolution. Using consciousness may consume the least energy (the brain uses a lot of energy), take the least genetic material to describe, have the safest learning curve (so that children are more intelligent and more likely to survive), or any combination of these and other features. I think of experience as a sophisticated mathematical object with useful functionality. We have a disconnect with physical reality, and a strong connection with informational reality. I can assert that I exist, and the abstract model of my phone I keep in my head exists, but I can't assert that the phone exists and in reality its existence is very different from how I perceive it. It certainly seems like I am an information construct that was formed within a physical reality. Beyond that I'm mostly in the dark though. You can see that consciousness is involved in learning and adapting- you are highly conscious of new skills and change, but old skills sink into the subconscious and you gradually ignore repeated stimulus. You can see that consciousness integrates much of our intelligent functionality (perception, memory, executive function) and you can feel that your role is to run things. How is experience related to all of this? I do not know.
  - amarte 6y ago
    In your first comment you proposed that, "Either consciousness is something composed of information processing, or it is something inherent to the universe that has some evolutionarily efficient use towards information processing." Sometimes I try to imagine the later case, and it really flips reality on its head. The limit and most extreme case is that reality is fundamentally experiential -- that is, what comes first is "being", "feeling", "embodiment", and through this lens is found structure, objects, form, etc. Obviously this is just the reverse of the idea that consciousness emerges from an underlying physical substrate performing complex processes. Either way, there is a definite correlation between the two -- feelings have their correlate molecular, biochemical basis, and molecules working together through processes have their transcendent embodiment as feelings experienced. The question of "what is real?" can boil down to this: are things external to consciousness fundamentally real and consciousness an ephemeral, emergent flourish floating "on top", or is consciousness real and everything observed by it a kind of flourishing of it? This is a bit of a rabbit hole with many different paths to fall down, as I'm sure you know. Scientific knowledge is rooted in observation and the dusting away of uncertainty to reveal an objective reality we all share. From this standpoint, the objective substrate being revealed and it's complex processes is taken as fundamental, and we have all the great successes of scientific knowledge to show as justification for this to be true. The only hole seems to be, why the hell am I embodied, then? -- why am I conscious at all? Life would probably be easier if I didn't see that hole and want to search for more satisfying answers!

WClayFerguson 6y ago

I agree intelligence emerges from consciousness, but not the other way around. I define intelligence as the ability to use experiences and memories to construct useful mental models that can be used to predict the future based on the past, solve problems, discover correlations between patterns, and things like that. So intelligence uses memories as it's building blocks for recombining and recognizing patterns, but as you'll see in a nearby reply in this comment thread by me, I have a theory about memory which is that it's not "stored" but your brain accesses essentially the 'actual' event thru spacetime, and that the 'accessing' of these past events and merging those 'wave-forms' and entangling them with the present brain state, is what we call consciousness, regardless of whether any intelligent processing is happening.

amarte 6y ago

I've heard consciousness described as "the felt presence of immediate experience," which I've found to be an excellent description of the experience of being embodied in the world -- of being conscious. If consciousness is an emergent phenomenon, meaning if there are atoms flying around spontaneously assembling into more and more complex forms of order until some critical point of complexity is reached and consciousness appears, what's the point of "being conscious" at all? If the assembling of particles into forms of order is what's fundamental, surely that process could just go on and on without any bit of it feeling embodied. It seems to me like the universe could be exactly the same without "the felt presence of immediate experience"/consciousness. Atoms would be whizzing around, people would be pontificating, GPT-3 would be chugging away. It would all just be kind of "empty" -- all surface no substance. I don't need to feel embodied for the world to be the way it is, yet I do, and I struggle to understand why that is.

Stupulous 6y ago
This is a question I've considered for a long while. As programmers we can easily see that no set of behaviours require consciousness. I touched on this in my previous comment, it is my belief that consciousness is not the only way that intelligence can be made, but that it is somehow efficient for the purposes of evolution. Using consciousness may consume the least energy (the brain uses a lot of energy), take the least genetic material to describe, have the safest learning curve (so that children are more intelligent and more likely to survive), or any combination of these and other features. I think of experience as a sophisticated mathematical object with useful functionality. We have a disconnect with physical reality, and a strong connection with informational reality. I can assert that I exist, and the abstract model of my phone I keep in my head exists, but I can't assert that the phone exists and in reality its existence is very different from how I perceive it. It certainly seems like I am an information construct that was formed within a physical reality. Beyond that I'm mostly in the dark though. You can see that consciousness is involved in learning and adapting- you are highly conscious of new skills and change, but old skills sink into the subconscious and you gradually ignore repeated stimulus. You can see that consciousness integrates much of our intelligent functionality (perception, memory, executive function) and you can feel that your role is to run things. How is experience related to all of this? I do not know.
- amarte 6y ago
  In your first comment you proposed that, "Either consciousness is something composed of information processing, or it is something inherent to the universe that has some evolutionarily efficient use towards information processing." Sometimes I try to imagine the later case, and it really flips reality on its head. The limit and most extreme case is that reality is fundamentally experiential -- that is, what comes first is "being", "feeling", "embodiment", and through this lens is found structure, objects, form, etc. Obviously this is just the reverse of the idea that consciousness emerges from an underlying physical substrate performing complex processes. Either way, there is a definite correlation between the two -- feelings have their correlate molecular, biochemical basis, and molecules working together through processes have their transcendent embodiment as feelings experienced. The question of "what is real?" can boil down to this: are things external to consciousness fundamentally real and consciousness an ephemeral, emergent flourish floating "on top", or is consciousness real and everything observed by it a kind of flourishing of it? This is a bit of a rabbit hole with many different paths to fall down, as I'm sure you know. Scientific knowledge is rooted in observation and the dusting away of uncertainty to reveal an objective reality we all share. From this standpoint, the objective substrate being revealed and it's complex processes is taken as fundamental, and we have all the great successes of scientific knowledge to show as justification for this to be true. The only hole seems to be, why the hell am I embodied, then? -- why am I conscious at all? Life would probably be easier if I didn't see that hole and want to search for more satisfying answers!