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The Hard Problem of Breakfast
- Konohamaru 6y agoBreakfast and the foods that make it up exist as a social convention / "unwritten rule" but consciousness doesn't. Not even the most extreme eliminative materialist believes consciousness is a social convention. Therefore this whole article relies on the false analogy fallacy.
- Animats 6y agoWas this written by GPT-2? (Not GPT-3; it's not coherent enough.)
- klipt 6y agoIt's a coherent satire of "the hard problem of consciousness" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness
- klenwell 6y agoJonathan Bines is a staff writer for Jimmy Kimmel Live. Not that this rules out your theory.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- NhanH 6y agoI was about to downvote this comment, but I went and checked the first 8 citations in the articles. None of them exists, and yes, the article makes very little sense as well.
- 5986043handy 6y agoYep can confirm none of the citations check out
- crooked-v 6y agoIt's a satirical article, and thus has satirical citations.
- anu7df 6y agoWhat is this supposed to be? I am with Animats on this one. Surely no better than GPT-2
- 5986043handy 6y agoyep, the citations don't lead anywhere
- alicemaz 6y agoit's an extremely poor attempt at a joke about consciousness
- spanhandler 6y agoI dunno, I’m actually about halfway to being convinced that if we can figure out what causes breakfast we’ll necessarily have solved the problem of consciousness, too.
- plutonorm 6y agoThe point is breakfast is what we define it to be. It is a set of objects that have certain properties that we deem to be described as breakfast. In the same way consciousness is what we decide it to be. There is no natural definition, its a thing we made up. This also implies that searching for the natural explanation of consciousness is about as useful as searching for the natural definition of breakfast. I disagree, but thats what the article is saying.
- stewbrew 6y agoThe article is saying that there is an experience/phenomenon of "the breakfast" that cannot be explained by an analysis of its constituents. The whole (the breakfast) is more/something else than the sum of its parts. Contemporary scientists only look at the parts because that's what their methods allow them to do/reason about. They miss the essence of the breakfast. Their methods don't even allow them to acknowledge that breakfasts exist -- however & whatever that would mean and imply. Since I think the current scientific treatment of consciousness is rather deplorable (unconscious scientists unconsciously trying to be consciously smart), I like this article.
- klipt 6y agoThis is a satire of "the hard problem of consciousness" in philosophy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness
- internet2000 6y agoIt’s very unfunny, even as satire.
- FeepingCreature 6y agoUnfortunately, it is accurate to the questionable nature of that debate.
- spanhandler 6y agoI took it in the spirit of questioning one’s questions, and thought it was rather good. Russellian, even. Judging from the general reaction in here this may just mean I’m a dim bulb with a bad sense of humor.
- aaron-santos 6y agoYou're fine. HN is uniquely unsuited to judging the quality of humor.
- canjobear 6y agoI laughed out loud.
- qubex 6y agoIt’s so unfunny it caused me to start pondering issues regarding the breakfast I’ve just sat down to eat.
- stewbrew 6y agoMaybe universities should teach satire as a form of a scientific investigation. I first wanted to write that it should be acknowledged as a proper form of inquiry at least in philosophy. After further consideration, I'd say it should be a mandatory building block for all students.
- dstroot 6y agoIs it April 1st already?
- grawprog 6y agoHN needs to lighten up sometimes that article went over pretty easy. It might be a little scrambled, but you can poach meaning from it if you try. Things don't always have to have such a deep hard boiled meaning.
- _pastel 6y agoIt's a little hard to digest, but definitely food for thought.
- dbtc 6y agoPuns are my bread and butter but even I'd have to say you're really milking it there. And I suppose this kind of humor is not just everyone's cup of tea.
- blaser-waffle 6y agoI think this thread is toast.
- tus88 6y ago> It has long been understood that no breakfast can exist in the absence of its constituent foods and their related supporting structures such as plates and bowls, utensils, and toasters How did this pass review?
- crooked-v 6y agoIt's a satirical piece.
- anikan_vader 6y ago>> The stubborn fact remains that, no matter how deeply we probe into the nature of bacon, eggs, oatmeal, and avocado toast—to say nothing of shakshuka, grits, bear claws, or dim sum—or the interactions between these fundamental building blocks and, say, orange juice or coffee and the morning paper, we simply have no convincing theory to explain how such disparate, seemingly inert components give rise to the phenomenon we subjectively experience as “breakfast.” That's the best sentence I've read in a long time, despite the fact that the pandemic has me spending too much time surfing HN. I think the author makes a very solid, implicit, argument regarding the problem of consciousness. The "problem" is hard to pin down. It doesn't seem any more implausible to me that consciousness is an emergent property from our brain bio/chem/physics then that hurricanes and diamonds and stalagmites naturally emerge from their respective environments. Or that massive spaceships emerge from Conway's Game of Life. Of course humans claim that we're special - "My consciousness is more important than a darned stalagmite!" - thinking of ourselves as more important than rocks and hurricanes, as more special, gives us a desire to survive. Our predecessors who genuinely thought they were no more "special" than a stalagmite were ineffective at passing down their genes. So I claim that the hard problem of consciousness is not such a hard problem, but rather just a case of us humans being obsessed with ourselves.
- radley 6y agoIt's like asking "why is a flopping disc the icon for Save? Still today?" It's because it's the easiest approach to understanding "this means Save". If eggs are what's for breakfast, fine. Don't make me think. It's too early.
- the_other 6y agoHere, take this coffee...
- GeneralMayhem 6y agoI think you're sidestepping the issue a bit. The hard problem of consciousness doesn't say that consciousness has to be better as a value judgment, just that it... is. Saying that it's an emergent property of physics doesn't address the problem. Sure, any old combination of atoms can randomly become conscious if they get lucky, but what does that mean? And it is a hard problem: how do you even define subjective consciousness non-circularly? "Consciousness is the state of feeling like something" - okay, but what is it that's doing the feeling?
- jaza 6y agoWhile I laud the analysis, the methodology seems questionable at best. Lacking strawberry, quinoa, chia, and even paprika. Where's the rigour?
- paulie_a 6y agoIt's lacking everything. Eggs and paprika are cheap as hell. The amazing egg is healthy despite 40 years lies
- djrobstep 6y agoI'm an atheist with zero spiritual inclinations whatsoever, but it does seem to me that science has not properly grappled with the hard problem of consciousness. Everything I've read that tackles it from a science perspective seems like side-stepping, weasel words ("emergent property"), or wholesale denial ("it's an illusion"). Not very scientific! There seems to be a collective hubris at play, where people are afraid to say "I don't know".
- lambdatronics 6y agoOnce I read a neuroscience article saying that all of our senses are external to the brain -- the brain only 'experiences' electrical signals, not 'reality.' What if we do have sensory neurons in our brains, though -- wouldn't that lead to a sense of self? Quite literally. I suspect it's something like that. We can do better than say "I don't know." We already know that consciousness can be manipulated with drugs, electrodes, accidents, etc. That rules out the metaphysics and quantum voodoo some people think is necessary. It's not a solved problem, but I'm confident we'll find the a perfectly scientific explanation. In that sense, it's merely a hard problem, not "The Hard Problem."
- 082349872349872 6y agoHere is my Blindsight inspired hypothesis, that consciousness has been an accidental application to ourselves of mechanisms that are useful for predicting the behaviour of others: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23475069 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23475069 In breakfast terms: if it has been fitness-increasing in the past to note that all the other animals go down to the water hole at similar times (thereby freeing up some desirable carcasses for scavenging? or at least making it easier to cross over to far away trees while the predators are busy elsewhere?) we may start to model mealtimes. Once we notice that others have a morning feed that affect our actions ("breakfast" is followed by "rush hour"), it isn't that big a jump for our grey cells to experience our own morning feed in the same category, as breakfast.
- darawk 6y agoThis article perfectly articulates my sentiments about the "hard problem of consciousness". It's a made up problem. There is no such thing as consciousness. It's a term we made up to differentiate ourselves from the rest of the matter in the universe because we wanted to feel special. There is no mystery of consciousness, the only mystery is why humans are incapable of accepting the fact that they are just stuff, like any other matter in the universe.
- tidenly 6y agoConsciousness does exist in some form though. The "experience" of sensations that we're both having right now is what many would label being conscious surely? I too don't think it's anything necessarily magical or separate from physicality about it, but it certainly exists.
- acidbaseextract 6y agoA typical way to articulate it is that the experience of consciousness is just another sense-perception, not the "center of you". In the same way that your sense for certain types of light is called sight, your sense for certain types of neural activity is consciousness.
- ehnto 6y agoBut does it have to be anything else? That insight doesn't actually change the discussion or what we are trying to describe I don't think.
- imtringued 6y agoWe have consciousness because our brain tells us we do. Establishing anything beyond this is futile. Consciousness sounds like an extremely beneficial evolutionary trait to me. Imagine an "unconscious human" who shares the same body as us but the brain thinks it can't think, thinks it is dead, thinks that nothing it senses is alive or real including itself and its own thoughts. That unconscious human can definitively exist as an organism but it would have a hard time to coexist in a community of humans. Please don't nitpick the usage of the word "think" because I'm referring to "machine style" thinking. A computer can think without being conscious.
- skybrian 6y agoYou might prefer this description of breakfast: https://meaningness.com/eggplant/routine https://meaningness.com/eggplant/routine
- aaron695 6y agoI honestly thought it's a bit silly but I get the idea how complex breakfast is. And I thought it was nice philosophers still have something useful to do and talk about these things because science will soon find out what makes breakfast, or if it even exists. It's great HN is discussing this stuff. Come to comments, oh, it's just about consciousness again.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]