8 ms·

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 em

by 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!
  - Stupulous 6y ago
    I wrote out my thoughts on my answers to the two questions, and they wound up being long and a little tangential to the bulk of your comment, so I figured I'd throw in a thanks for the thought-provoking reply. I am enjoying this conversation. What is real? Consciousness self-asserts: (1a) 'I think, therefore I am' (or else, 'thought is occurring, so thought must exist'). If you accept the reasoning there, you can also grapple in (1b) 'I see blue, therefore blue exists', etc. In that sense, our consciousness is a rare example of something that definitively exists. A statement like 'there is a rock in space called Earth' would be false if we lived in a computer simulation. The correct statement becomes 'there are a bunch of numbers representing a rock in space called Earth, in this computer'. Consciousness doesn't answer to the abstraction in the same way. 'I see a rock in space that I think of as Earth' is true regardless of whether you're inside of the simulation. We can also assert that reality exists, as far as (2) 'there is a thing that my experience interacts with which I do not consciously control and which exhibits complex behavior', and also, (3) 'I exist (per 1a), therefore I am somewhere. I can perform computations, therefore the place I am in must allow for computations to occur. I have experience (per 1b) therefore there I am somewhere in which experience can exist. Reality exists (per 2) therefore there must be something sophisticated enough to produce it.' But that's strictly an informational definition, again equally true whether or not you're in your own dream- it only addresses the complexity of the mind producing the dream. So to conclude: information is quintessentially real. Our consciousness and reality are real at least to the extents that they are information, which are 'very much so' and 'a lot, maybe more', respectively. Physical reality as we know it might be real, Occam's Razor says 'probably', Simulation Hypothesis says 'probably not'. Anyone's game. I think that a physical reality of some form must exist in order to perform computations and produce information, but I'm open to a rebuttal. And then why the hell am I conscious? This seems to be the crux of the matter. It is my opinion that the answer is of the form 'consciousness solves problem X efficiently along dimensions Y and Z' where X is some fundamental component of intelligence, and Y and Z are environmental constraints. I think it's unlikely that the answer is related to the fundamental makeup of the universe. Evolution follows the path of least resistance, and entangling our minds with some innate property of quanta, from the scale of proteins seems more challenging than other conceivable non-conscious solutions to general intelligence.

by amarte 6y ago

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!
- Stupulous 6y ago
  I wrote out my thoughts on my answers to the two questions, and they wound up being long and a little tangential to the bulk of your comment, so I figured I'd throw in a thanks for the thought-provoking reply. I am enjoying this conversation. What is real? Consciousness self-asserts: (1a) 'I think, therefore I am' (or else, 'thought is occurring, so thought must exist'). If you accept the reasoning there, you can also grapple in (1b) 'I see blue, therefore blue exists', etc. In that sense, our consciousness is a rare example of something that definitively exists. A statement like 'there is a rock in space called Earth' would be false if we lived in a computer simulation. The correct statement becomes 'there are a bunch of numbers representing a rock in space called Earth, in this computer'. Consciousness doesn't answer to the abstraction in the same way. 'I see a rock in space that I think of as Earth' is true regardless of whether you're inside of the simulation. We can also assert that reality exists, as far as (2) 'there is a thing that my experience interacts with which I do not consciously control and which exhibits complex behavior', and also, (3) 'I exist (per 1a), therefore I am somewhere. I can perform computations, therefore the place I am in must allow for computations to occur. I have experience (per 1b) therefore there I am somewhere in which experience can exist. Reality exists (per 2) therefore there must be something sophisticated enough to produce it.' But that's strictly an informational definition, again equally true whether or not you're in your own dream- it only addresses the complexity of the mind producing the dream. So to conclude: information is quintessentially real. Our consciousness and reality are real at least to the extents that they are information, which are 'very much so' and 'a lot, maybe more', respectively. Physical reality as we know it might be real, Occam's Razor says 'probably', Simulation Hypothesis says 'probably not'. Anyone's game. I think that a physical reality of some form must exist in order to perform computations and produce information, but I'm open to a rebuttal. And then why the hell am I conscious? This seems to be the crux of the matter. It is my opinion that the answer is of the form 'consciousness solves problem X efficiently along dimensions Y and Z' where X is some fundamental component of intelligence, and Y and Z are environmental constraints. I think it's unlikely that the answer is related to the fundamental makeup of the universe. Evolution follows the path of least resistance, and entangling our minds with some innate property of quanta, from the scale of proteins seems more challenging than other conceivable non-conscious solutions to general intelligence.