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This 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'

• tidenly 6y ago
  Consciousness 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 ago
    A 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 ago
      But 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 ago
        We 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.
  • aeturnum 6y ago
    This definition is fine as long as you extend it to all living things. In some sense all plants and animals (and bacteria and fungus) are experiencing sensations. Of course, doing that removes any sense that humans are special or unique, which was darawk's point.
    • goatlover 6y ago
      The hard problem of consciousness isn't about humans being special. It's just a starting point because we know ourselves to be conscious. The hard problem is explaining our subjective experiences in physical terms. And it's the same problem for anything that has subjective experiences. Thus Nagel bringing up bat sonar experiences and Block using Commander Data.
      • stewbrew 6y ago
        The even harder problem is to understand that those physical terms are a temporary consens among conscious beings-not some absolute truth. You cannot think physics as if you were not a human.
    • GeneralMayhem 6y ago
      We do not know that all plants and animals experience sensations subjectively. We know that they respond to stimuli; we do not know that they experience qualia. This path can lead to solipsism, but there are many exit points between "I am the only conscious being" and "all living things are conscious."
      • lmm 6y ago
        We don't know that anything experiences qualia, ourselves included, because the concept hasn't been rigorously defined - perhaps because it's not actually a valid concept at all.
        • GeneralMayhem 6y ago
          I think you're going to find it a very hard sell to convince me that I don't experience qualia. I don't know what it's like to feel pain? I don't experience sight, or sound, or abstract thoughts and beliefs, as subjective experiences? The problem with qualia, subjective consciousness, and all their near-synonyms is that they're almost impossible to define non-self-referentially. That doesn't mean they don't exist, though - and all human experience is indication that they do.
• yoav 6y ago
  I was explaining this to someone on twitter the other day. Well said.
• ehnto 6y ago
  I agree with your conclusion that we are just a fantastic bundle of jiggling, excited stuff. But that doesn't preclude a discussion about the experience we have of that stuff in motion.
  • qubex 6y ago
    That viewpoint is nicely argued by Gary Marcus in Kluge (2008): that we’re basically a collection of hacks (and not the the Marvin Minsky Society of Mind sense) but that this makes our cognition fascinating in (yet another) it’s own way.
• burke 6y ago
  Absolutely. This quote from Westworld articulates is nicely too: "The self is a kind of fiction, for hosts and humans alike. It's a story we tell ourselves. [...] There is no threshold that makes us greater than the sum of our parts, no inflection point at which we become fully alive. We can't define consciousness because consciousness does not exist. Humans fancy that there's something special about the way we perceive the world, and yet we live in loops as tight and as closed as the hosts do, seldom questioning our choices, content, for the most part, to be told what to do next. No, my friend, you're not missing anything at all."
  • goatlover 6y ago
    Only if you think replacing talk of subjective experiences like color, sound, pain, etc. with talk of loops and inflection points in the context of androids makes the hard problem go away. I could quote Morpheus rhetorically asking Neo what reality is and then answering with, "If real is what you can feel, smell, taste and see, then 'real' is simply electrical signals interpreted by your brain." Which doesn't settle any philosophical discussion on the nature of reality or perception, or render those discussions moot.
• dasil003 6y ago
  You see hubris in those who would put human consciousness on a pedestal above any other organization of matter in the universe. I see hubris in those who would declare our limited observations of the universe as descriptive of the holistic nature of reality. The truth is we can’t ever be sure our understanding is complete. This is why philosophy exists as distinct from science and always will.
• mvn9 6y ago
  And yet you can be unconscious. For sure, consciousness is used to put humans over other creatures [1]. But that doesn't mean that consciousness doesn't exist. Why don't you look at it the other way round and assume consciousness wherever possible? Vegans have compassion with animals because they see consciousness. Are they wrong? Or don't they go far enough and plants and even stones have consciousness? But then, why don't we feel different when we cut our hair and lose some matter, or exchange all atoms of our body during our life? [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24165923 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24165923
  • arnoooooo 6y ago
    > you can be uncounscious Uncounsciousness is often taken to mean the absence of consciousness, but it could just as well be the absence of objects in consciousness. After all, by definition, no one has ever had first-hand experience of their consciousness disappearing, so we don't even know that consciousness can disappear. Likewise for consciousness appearing.
  • vladTheInhaler 6y ago
    We don't "feel different" because there is no evolutionarily useful purpose to feeling bad about cutting off a hair. And that's probably why most people don't feel so bad about having an animal killed in order for us to eat. It seems likely to me that our ability to have compassion for animals is in some sense a "misfire" of a system that was "intended" to help us cooperate with other humans. We're stretching a system way beyond its original purpose. My point is just that the way we feel about a certain action says almost nothing about the nature of reality or morality, but rather about us as a species. Whether or not stones have a consciousness wouldn't affect how bad we feel about crushing them into dust. For what it's worth, I tend to lean toward the "not far enough" camp. I see no good reason to assume that there is anything special about any particular arrangement of matter that causes there to be something that it is like to be that matter. I think it is more accurate to consciousness, than to say that we are conscious. There are still interesting questions to answer about consciousness. One of them being "why does the brain spend so much effort simulating an internally consistent model of what it's "like" to be me?" - and we know that it is, because it flaps my jaws and wiggles my fingers on the keyboard in patterns that are consistent with that It seems like a lot of resources to spend on something that isn't incredibly useful somehow. But those are questions about the mechanics of the brain, not about some mystic property or sensory qualia
• kranner 6y ago
  You've made a huge leap from there-is-no-hard-problem-of-consciousness to there-is-no-consciousness. Consciousness is the experience of being something. I know it exists, because I'm experiencing it right now. The experience is consciousness, despite being illusory in many ways. Even a completely illusory experience is a conscious experience. In no way does it preclude my just being stuff, or other forms of stuff experiencing things too (and thus also being conscious). The mystery is how I can feel anything at all despite being just stuff.
  • lambdatronics 6y ago
    The problem with these debates is that they turn into a referendum on how people feel about mysticism. Some want to think that a mysterious phenomenon like consciousness requires a solution that takes us beyond science into the mystical. Others can't stand mysticism, especially not in a field of scientific inquiry. If neuroscience provides a detailed scientific explanation for how consciousness works, that'll put it all to rest. Of course, the mysticism camp doesn't believe this is possible even in principle, and there are likely to be some holdouts even after the problem is solved, just like we have flat earthers now.
    • kranner 6y ago
      I wonder if the solution will turn out to have too many components to be satisfyingly understandable by humans, i.e. something like a 200-page proof that only a proof checker can validate. That may be a situation to confound both the mysterians and the non-mysterians.
      • klipt 6y ago
        Or a proof only creatures who znurg can understand https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/znurg-2 https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/znurg-2
      • FeepingCreature 6y ago
        I expect the solution to turn out to be so simple that nobody will take it seriously.
• geofft 6y ago
  > 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. I don't know that I'd go that far. Is there such a thing as quicksort, or is it a term we made up to differentiate certain bit patterns from the rest of the possible bit patterns (i.e., the rest of the positive integers)? You could write an article like this about quicksort. At what point do you look at a certain positive integer, usually a couple thousand digits long, and say, "Behold, there is quicksort for x86_64"? (What is x86_64, for that matter? Scientists have recently proven it can exist without silicon, and it is well known that silicon can exist without x86_64.) I'd agree with something extremely close to your point - that consciousness is an abstraction, just like quicksort and x86_64 are - and I'd even happily admit that abstractions are things we've made up, but just because something is an abstraction doesn't mean it isn't real!
  • lmm 6y ago
    Quicksort is a legitimate model though; there are objective answers about what is a quicksort and what isn't. Two people will never look at the same processor running the same algorithm and disagree about whether it's a quicksort or not (or if they do, they'll be able to localise that disagreement down to a more specific question like whether using the cache in a particular way qualifies as using extra memory). Whereas two people might look at the same processor running the same algorithm, agree about all the measurable facts and all of the lower-level definitions they were using, and still disagree about whether it was conscious.
    • geofft 6y ago
      We can find plenty of fuzzier abstractions. Does "machine learning" exist? Does "NoSQL"? Does "scrum"? (That one can't even be used to describe an integer, and it certainly doesn't describe a physical object.) I'd claim that if two people agree about measurable facts and disagree about whether something is conscious, they do in fact disagree on the definition of consciousness, just as if they disagreed on whether something counted as NoSQL or scrum. (Though it's been a while since I paid attention to this area of philosophy, so I might just be wrong here - is there an example of two people claiming to agree on the definition of consciousness but reaching different conclusions?) Honestly maybe this was the brilliance of the article. We don't even need to agree on the definition of "breakfast" to conclude that it's a useful and meaningful term. Nobody would claim breakfast doesn't exist on the mere grounds that it's made up. Of course it's made up, it's an abstraction.
• goatlover 6y ago
  So, what is a red visual experience? Is it the reflective surface of the red-looking object? Is it photons around 700 nanometers wavelength? Is it the electrons traveling to the visual cortex from the eyes? Is it the neural activity in the visual cortex? Is it the symphony of different brain regions brining it all together into a visual experience? Is this the exact symphony that plays in my brain that plays in yours when we look at the same red object? What about when you dream of a red object?
  • geofft 6y ago
    I'd argue that the question isn't well-defined - same as asking whether your experience of counting to five is the same as mine. There is no "experience" of seeing red beyond the simple fact of perceiving 700nm-wavelength light. It is no more possible for me to experience as blue what you experience as red, and vice versa, as for me to experience as 3 what you experience as 2. If I experienced it as 3, that is, one less than 4, it would actually be 3. When I dream of three objects, I experience them just like you would. I don't see why dreaming of a red object would be any different.
    • goatlover 6y ago
      > I'd argue that the question isn't well-defined - same as asking whether your experience of counting to five is the same as mine. There is no "experience" of seeing red beyond the simple fact of perceiving 700nm-wavelength light. If your brain can detect 700nm-wavelength light without you having a conscious experience of red, then there certainly is a question. Also, dreaming of red is not perceiving red, since there is no 700nm light. This is why you can't just simply reduce an experience to the stimulus. > It is no more possible for me to experience as blue what you experience as red, and vice versa, as for me to experience as 3 what you experience as 2. If I experienced it as 3, that is, one less than 4, it would actually be 3. When I dream of three objects, I experience them just like you would. I don't see why dreaming of a red object would be any different. The question isn't about the quality of your subjective experiences, it's about whether the pattern of neurons firing would necessarily be the same between people. If not, then you can't simply reduced subjective experiences to brain states. This has been a long standing objecting to the identity theory of mind.
• dTal 6y ago
  >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. ...which begs the question, rather; why are we the only bits of matter to have done this?
• GeneralMayhem 6y ago
  No such thing as consciousness? I can understand an idea that consciousness is somehow pervasive, along the lines of panpsychism - but that doesn't make it nonexistent. Or, in the other direction, consciousness can be binary and rare but not particularly special, if it emerges from a confluence of lesser phenomena - but then it does still exist, and we're arguing only over its value. Do you not doubt, ergo think, ergo be? Who is reading this sentence?
• arnoooooo 6y ago
  There is indeed no mystery of consciousness except that some humans are incapable of accepting the fact that they are just consciousness, matter just being their user interface with the rest of consciousness. This works just as well (better IMHO), does it not ?