9 ms·

How Did Consciousness Evolve? (2016)

66 points by andrewon 6y ago

dang 6y ago
Discussed at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11849621 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11849621
travisoliphant 6y ago
I didn’t read the entire thread of previous discussion. The referenced article is consistent with the work of Thomas Metzinger who wrote a very accessible book called “The Ego Tunnel” as a follow on to his more detailed and scholarly treatise “Being No One” He introduced me to the ideas in this paper that he induced from his own observations of his “mystical” experiences. It is fascinating to realize these self models exist in a wide variety of animals and the modeling of others is what makes some animals different. In “Sapiens” https://books.google.com/books/about/Sapiens.html https://books.google.com/books/about/Sapiens.html Yuval Harari argues that Homo sapiens took over all other Homo species because of the development of “myth” which may be related to the Hyperactive attribution of consciousness referenced in the article. Humans cooperate at scale much better than any other species (but also fight at scale more aggressively) because we can communicate about abstractions. Very interesting inter-related ideas.
- proc0 6y ago
  Metzinger is great, wish he was in more AI talks.
GreenHeuristics 6y ago
This theory posits that consciousness evolved by ... consciousness being a solution to a problem. This passes for a scientific theory?
- dalbasal 6y ago
  From wikipedia: "In the theory, an attention schema did not evolve so that we could walk around claiming to have consciousness. Instead it evolved because it has fundamental adaptive uses in perception, cognition, and social interaction."
techbio 6y ago
Define "consciousness". Edit: The article makes an attempt, and posits that it is this https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attention_schema_theory https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attention_schema_theory
hliyan 6y ago
While the argument that our self-models and social models evolved from our early "covert attention" mechanisms may in fact be valid, it still doesn't explain what consciousness is. Without introducing panpsychism [1], these explanations of consciousness fall prey to the Chinese Room argument [2]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panpsychism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panpsychism [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room
- trevyn 6y ago
  Is there a term for an argument that is so convoluted and makes so many assumptions that in order to even start to make any sense of it, you are forced to accept its flawed premises?
  - trevyn 6y ago
    Actually, I take that back. >A program ... knows where to put the symbols and how to move them around, but it doesn't know what they stand for or what they mean. At a certain level of complexity, it must "know what they stand for or what they mean" in its encoding of how to move them around in order to move them around correctly. Axiom failed. This sounds like it might be a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category_mistake https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category_mistake Edit, references to refutations of Chinese Room argument: Hofstadter, D., 1981, ‘Reflections on Searle’, in Hofstadter and Dennett (eds.), The Mind's I, New York: Basic Books, pp. 373–382. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/chinese-room/#ReplChinRoomArgu https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/chinese-room/#ReplChinRoo... "Margaret Boden (1988) raises levels considerations. “Computational psychology does not credit the brain with seeing bean-sprouts or understanding English: intentional states such as these are properties of people, not of brains” (244). “In short, Searle’s description of the robot’s pseudo-brain (that is, of Searle-in-the-robot) as understanding English involves a category-mistake comparable to treating the brain as the bearer, as opposed to the causal basis, of intelligence”. Boden (1988) points out that the room operator is a conscious agent, while the CPU in a computer is not – the Chinese Room scenario asks us to take the perspective of the implementer, and not surprisingly fails to see the larger picture."
- 6y ago
throw_m239339 6y ago
> What is the adaptive value of consciousness? When did it evolve and what animals have it? That's a very good question, what is the first thing our evolutionary ancestors ever did, the first thought they ever had that made them different from all other species on the planet and deemed us sentient? Or is the question of consciousness purely a philosophical one? since we can't really define the difference between humans and other species? Or can we?
- hans1729 6y ago
  > we can't really define the difference between humans and other species? Or can we? Am I missing something? The difference is genetics, manifested via neocortex and thumbs. The question isn't purely philosophical though, as there are entire fields devoted to the topic (cognitive sciences, areas of neuroscience, areas of ai research) Personally, I subscribe to something along the lines of attention schema theory and panpsychism, and the last time I mentioned this on HN, lots of people agreed with this notion: the state of physical imbalance is, in mathematical terms, both sufficient and necessary for consciousness to evolve. (So if there is an imbalance in the realm of electromagnetic forces on some atom, the atoms 'urge' to adapt is what we describe as consciousness, albeit we usually experience the same phenomenon from a vastly more complex and abstract viewpoint (through the attention-mechanisms of our brain))
- erikpukinskis 6y ago
  My unfounded pet theory is that everything other than us has always had a form of consciousness... that is, a feeling of presence. But that it’s tied to a feeling of connectedness. The insect doesn’t differentiate the presence of itself from the presence of the flower it’s in. It’s all one presence. So what we label “consciousness” is the ability to turn off the connectedness thing. We see ourselves as present and everything else as abstract or distant. I think it’s evolutionarily adaptive, because the insect doesn’t _really_ care if it’s eaten by the flower. It’ll recoil from stress but it won’t fight to continue to exist with the same fervor that a “conscious” creature will. But the irony for many of us is we are on a journey to rekindle that connected feeling. A major goal of life for some is to shed the lie of individualism and keep in mind the truth we knew before we became “conscious”—that we don’t really exist separately from the world around us. We are part of thousands of collective consciousnesses and we can only perceive the world at all through those collective eyes.
Animats 6y ago
Too many people philosophize over how "consciousness" evolved. Too few work on how "common sense" evolved. Common sense can be usefully defined as the ability to predict the consequences of one's actions before doing them. That has clear survival value. AI systems are currently terrible at it. This is a reasonably well defined hard problem.
082349872349872 6y ago
> "Data from my own lab suggests that the cortical networks in the human brain that allow us to attribute consciousness to others overlap extensively with the networks that construct our own sense of consciousness." That agrees with my guess that attribution to others came first, and our own is an accidental byproduct: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23475069 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23475069
- tsimionescu 6y ago
  First of all, I would be wary of any solid link between brain activity and high-level brain functions like consciousness. The rigour of some neuroscience experiments has been highly critized in the past [0]. Secondly, even if the finding is correct, it gives no information about which function came first. It is consistent both with the idea that 'consciousness is empathy/actor modeling applied to the self' and with the idea that 'empathy/actor modelling is consciousness applied to other actors'. In general, it is very hard to guess evolutionary timeliness from present structures where we have no idea of the genetic encoding of the current structures. [0] for example this study criticizing certain careless fMRI methods https://teenspecies.github.io/pdfs/NeuralCorrelates.pdf https://teenspecies.github.io/pdfs/NeuralCorrelates.pdf
- sooheon 6y ago
  Interesting theory, the article largely agrees with you. I'll add that "others" can include future selves, in which case the evolutionary benefit becomes clear. The capacity to model one's current state is recursive and superfluous, but the ability to model one's future potential states is essential to planning.
once-in-a-while 6y ago
It didn't. If everything (starting from nothing/nil/void) can be explained using "only" 6000 years (read the Bible), why are some people desperately trying to do exactly the following: We already /have/ a program which solves every detail perfectly, and uses only 6000 LOC. Now someone who denies the existence of God, wakes up some morning and tries to replace the perfect 6000 LOC with a 20.000.000(!!) LOC program, which is unbearably slow, doesn't even come close to solve anything of the original problem (only creates illusions of that), gets buggier by the month, and is only a waste of everyone's precious time? If the foundation (read: Faith) is wrong, anything built on it will crumble, given enough time... (we are watching a film here).
tus88 6y ago
I thought it was discovered by Descartes? My Phil is a bit rusty so go easy on me.
gomjabbar 6y ago
I like the Gom Jabbar theory: "You are never more alive, more awake, more conscious, than when in excruciating conflict with yourself" https://www.rifters.com/crawl/?p=791 https://www.rifters.com/crawl/?p=791
hyperpallium2 6y ago
Regarding the self-model, when we "identify" with a person, a fictional character, a group, an idea or an ideal, how literally true can it be?
pulkitsh1234 6y ago
Anyone overlooking the ancient Indian philosophical (or spiritual depending on the way you look at it) literature, a.k.a The Upanishads, is being ignorant about consciousness studies. The term "Chit" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cit_(consciousness) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cit_(consciousness)) was introduced by The Upanishads for referring to consciousness/awareness long before any of the modern philosophers did so. For more info: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yfUXXKB_G_Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yfUXXKB_G_Q
- yeaman1231 6y ago
  good luck mate, I (used to be one of those people) always run into people in tech that treat science as a religion (scientism) and simply refuse to look at philosophical traditions of their own culture (save for foreign cultures) because of their narrow modern conception of religion. On a separate note, I am interested in comparative theology (traditions in general) and the link you mentioned seems very interesting, thank you ---- Edit: For context: grew up in the middle east and living in California now, studied a ton about middle eastern theology and western theology, would love more resources on the east
- srtjstjsj 6y ago
  Your comment would be much better with out the needless antagonisic first sentence.
galacticaactual 6y ago
Do mushrooms. You will know, will no longer care, and want to maximize the application of said consciousness to the world.
mr_eggcup_teste 6y ago
Why it evolved right here on HN of course.
LatteLazy 6y ago
As far as I can tell, consciousness is just empathy for the self. I am conscious of myself in the same way I'm conscious of others (he's happy, he's angry, he's reliable etc). Of course being conscious of (and empathetic towards) others is a vital part of being a complex social animal like humans. So consciousness as we experience it is just a side effect of empathy which is selected for by evolution because it allows the sort of complex and limited cooperation humans use to survive. I have never seen anyone else say any of this. So maybe I'm missing some deeper revelation...
- tsimionescu 6y ago
  What you're describing is a tiny part of consciousness, and even that is hard to explain in this way. The way we empathize with others is exactly the opposite of what you describe - we notice certain outwards appearances and we imagine how we would have to feel to display the same, and so we identify their state as equivalent to what we have felt in the past. This is one reason why it is hard to empathize with situations that are way outside of our own lived experiences. Even this observation alone makes your argument dubious to me. But it is much harder to expand this argument to our ability to visualize situations, to experience sensations as they come, to feel joy or sadness or helplessness etc in the first place. My own belief (I don't believe we can say anything really scientific about this subject yet) is that consciousness will turn out to be a natural consequence of how a generally intelligent algorithm interacts with information, some necessary internal state. Most likely, as AI will advance in the next couple of centuries, we will be able to start observing this internal state in the first animal-level intelligence AIs.
qubex 6y ago
I’m personally fascinated by Julian Jaynes’ The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind that posits that humans had an innate ability to reason linguistically but that it was disjointed from their everyday living experience until some point in the historical record. Richard Dawkins famously commented “It is one of those books that is either complete rubbish or a work of consummate genius; Nothing in between! Probably the former, but I'm hedging my bets.’. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicameralism_(psychology) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicameralism_(psychology)
- Viliam1234 6y ago
  You might be interested in the Slate Star Codex review: https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/06/01/book-review-origin-of-consciousness-in-the-breakdown-of-the-bicameral-mind/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/06/01/book-review-origin-of-...
- srtjstjsj 6y ago
  Even the intro / historical section is fascinating. The book really shows how hard the problem is, as it reviews approaches throughoutout history that appear very strong until he pokes holes in then.
xtiansimon 6y ago
From The Atlantic article: "In the AST [...] was further adapted to model the attentional states of others, to allow for social prediction. Not only could the brain attribute consciousness to itself, it began to attribute consciousness to others." On the face of it this AST theory would nicely support Susan Blackmore's work on the `meme`. Recall Dawkins first proposed the meme, because he thought the gene was such a powerful mechanism there must be other similarly algorithmic mechanisms in nature. In her 1999 book on the subject Blackmore proposed the theory `imitation` is at the heart of the evolution of human theory of mind "...if you want to know whether that huge male gorilla is likely to attack you if you try to mate with this attractive female, you should try to imagine what you would do in the same situation." (Blackmore, 73.3) "'Arms races' are common in biology, as when predators evolve to run ever faster to catch their faster prey, or parasites evolve to outwit the immune systems of their hosts." (Blackmore, 74.2) "The turning point was when early hominids began to imitate each other. The origins of imitation itself are lost in our far past, but the selective (genetic) advantage of imitation is no mystery. [...] If your neighbor has learned something really useful - like which foods to eat and which to avoid [...] it may pay (in biological terms) to copy him. You can then avoid all the slow and potentially dangerous process of trying out new foods for yourself." (Blackmore, 75.3) "I suggested imitation requires three skills: making decisions about what to imitate, complex transformations from one point of view to another, and the production of matching bodily actions. These basic skills, or at least the beginnings of them, are available in many primates and were probably available to our ancestors of 5 million years ago. Primates have good motor control and hand coordination, and good general intelligence which would enable them to classify actions and decide what to imitate. Some of them can imagine events and manipulate them mentally [...] and, most notably, they have [social intelligence] and the beginnings of a theory of mind." (Blackmore, 75.5) Seems this AST theory would offer Darwinian continuity and fill gaps in the qualitative theories of mind between other organisms and the exceptional human condition. Blackmore, Susan. The Meme Machine. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. (1999) Dawkins, Richard. The Selfish Gene. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. (1976)
TheMightyLlama 6y ago
As a proposal, would consciousness not come about once a species starts becoming _maladapted_ to its environment? As the population dies out only those with consciousness and... I hesitate to say... smarts survive. This would have to happen an untold number of times for us to get where we are today.
drshuch 6y ago
Through the elaboration of organic life, culminating in the evolution of humans. That is all we, in our position, can speculate about.
drshuch 6y ago
Through the evolution of organic life on earth, culminating in human development.
acephal 6y ago
> The tectum is a beautiful piece of engineering. To control the head and the eyes efficiently, it constructs something called an internal model, a feature well known to engineers. An internal model is a simulation that keeps track of whatever is being controlled and allows for predictions and planning. The tectum’s internal model is a set of information encoded in the complex pattern of activity of the neurons. That information simulates the current state of the eyes, head, and other major body parts, making predictions about how these body parts will move next and about the consequences of their movement. For example, if you move your eyes to the right, the visual world should shift across your retinas to the left in a predictable way. The tectum compares the predicted visual signals to the actual visual input, to make sure that your movements are going as planned. These computations are extraordinarily complex and yet well worth the extra energy for the benefit to movement control. In fish and amphibians, the tectum is the pinnacle of sophistication and the largest part of the brain. A frog has a pretty good simulation of itself. There is actually an immense amount of meditation on this very notion of an internal model, antecedent to the modern concept of consciousness we've been discussing since Kant, which guides a life form, from Aristotle down to St. Thomas Aquinas. See Daniel Heller-Roazen's "The Inner Touch: Archaeology of a Sensation"

66 points by andrewon 6y ago

dang 6y ago

Discussed at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11849621 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11849621

I didn’t read the entire thread of previous discussion. The referenced article is consistent with the work of Thomas Metzinger who wrote a very accessible book called “The Ego Tunnel” as a follow on to his more detailed and scholarly treatise “Being No One” He introduced me to the ideas in this paper that he induced from his own observations of his “mystical” experiences. It is fascinating to realize these self models exist in a wide variety of animals and the modeling of others is what makes some animals different. In “Sapiens” https://books.google.com/books/about/Sapiens.html https://books.google.com/books/about/Sapiens.html Yuval Harari argues that Homo sapiens took over all other Homo species because of the development of “myth” which may be related to the Hyperactive attribution of consciousness referenced in the article. Humans cooperate at scale much better than any other species (but also fight at scale more aggressively) because we can communicate about abstractions. Very interesting inter-related ideas.

proc0 6y ago
Metzinger is great, wish he was in more AI talks.

GreenHeuristics 6y ago

This theory posits that consciousness evolved by ... consciousness being a solution to a problem. This passes for a scientific theory?

dalbasal 6y ago
From wikipedia: "In the theory, an attention schema did not evolve so that we could walk around claiming to have consciousness. Instead it evolved because it has fundamental adaptive uses in perception, cognition, and social interaction."

techbio 6y ago

Define "consciousness". Edit: The article makes an attempt, and posits that it is this https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attention_schema_theory https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attention_schema_theory

hliyan 6y ago

While the argument that our self-models and social models evolved from our early "covert attention" mechanisms may in fact be valid, it still doesn't explain what consciousness is. Without introducing panpsychism [1], these explanations of consciousness fall prey to the Chinese Room argument [2]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panpsychism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panpsychism [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room

trevyn 6y ago
Is there a term for an argument that is so convoluted and makes so many assumptions that in order to even start to make any sense of it, you are forced to accept its flawed premises?
- trevyn 6y ago
  Actually, I take that back. >A program ... knows where to put the symbols and how to move them around, but it doesn't know what they stand for or what they mean. At a certain level of complexity, it must "know what they stand for or what they mean" in its encoding of how to move them around in order to move them around correctly. Axiom failed. This sounds like it might be a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category_mistake https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category_mistake Edit, references to refutations of Chinese Room argument: Hofstadter, D., 1981, ‘Reflections on Searle’, in Hofstadter and Dennett (eds.), The Mind's I, New York: Basic Books, pp. 373–382. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/chinese-room/#ReplChinRoomArgu https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/chinese-room/#ReplChinRoo... "Margaret Boden (1988) raises levels considerations. “Computational psychology does not credit the brain with seeing bean-sprouts or understanding English: intentional states such as these are properties of people, not of brains” (244). “In short, Searle’s description of the robot’s pseudo-brain (that is, of Searle-in-the-robot) as understanding English involves a category-mistake comparable to treating the brain as the bearer, as opposed to the causal basis, of intelligence”. Boden (1988) points out that the room operator is a conscious agent, while the CPU in a computer is not – the Chinese Room scenario asks us to take the perspective of the implementer, and not surprisingly fails to see the larger picture."
6y ago

throw_m239339 6y ago

> What is the adaptive value of consciousness? When did it evolve and what animals have it? That's a very good question, what is the first thing our evolutionary ancestors ever did, the first thought they ever had that made them different from all other species on the planet and deemed us sentient? Or is the question of consciousness purely a philosophical one? since we can't really define the difference between humans and other species? Or can we?

hans1729 6y ago
> we can't really define the difference between humans and other species? Or can we? Am I missing something? The difference is genetics, manifested via neocortex and thumbs. The question isn't purely philosophical though, as there are entire fields devoted to the topic (cognitive sciences, areas of neuroscience, areas of ai research) Personally, I subscribe to something along the lines of attention schema theory and panpsychism, and the last time I mentioned this on HN, lots of people agreed with this notion: the state of physical imbalance is, in mathematical terms, both sufficient and necessary for consciousness to evolve. (So if there is an imbalance in the realm of electromagnetic forces on some atom, the atoms 'urge' to adapt is what we describe as consciousness, albeit we usually experience the same phenomenon from a vastly more complex and abstract viewpoint (through the attention-mechanisms of our brain))
erikpukinskis 6y ago
My unfounded pet theory is that everything other than us has always had a form of consciousness... that is, a feeling of presence. But that it’s tied to a feeling of connectedness. The insect doesn’t differentiate the presence of itself from the presence of the flower it’s in. It’s all one presence. So what we label “consciousness” is the ability to turn off the connectedness thing. We see ourselves as present and everything else as abstract or distant. I think it’s evolutionarily adaptive, because the insect doesn’t _really_ care if it’s eaten by the flower. It’ll recoil from stress but it won’t fight to continue to exist with the same fervor that a “conscious” creature will. But the irony for many of us is we are on a journey to rekindle that connected feeling. A major goal of life for some is to shed the lie of individualism and keep in mind the truth we knew before we became “conscious”—that we don’t really exist separately from the world around us. We are part of thousands of collective consciousnesses and we can only perceive the world at all through those collective eyes.

Animats 6y ago

Too many people philosophize over how "consciousness" evolved. Too few work on how "common sense" evolved. Common sense can be usefully defined as the ability to predict the consequences of one's actions before doing them. That has clear survival value. AI systems are currently terrible at it. This is a reasonably well defined hard problem.

082349872349872 6y ago

> "Data from my own lab suggests that the cortical networks in the human brain that allow us to attribute consciousness to others overlap extensively with the networks that construct our own sense of consciousness." That agrees with my guess that attribution to others came first, and our own is an accidental byproduct: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23475069 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23475069

tsimionescu 6y ago
First of all, I would be wary of any solid link between brain activity and high-level brain functions like consciousness. The rigour of some neuroscience experiments has been highly critized in the past [0]. Secondly, even if the finding is correct, it gives no information about which function came first. It is consistent both with the idea that 'consciousness is empathy/actor modeling applied to the self' and with the idea that 'empathy/actor modelling is consciousness applied to other actors'. In general, it is very hard to guess evolutionary timeliness from present structures where we have no idea of the genetic encoding of the current structures. [0] for example this study criticizing certain careless fMRI methods https://teenspecies.github.io/pdfs/NeuralCorrelates.pdf https://teenspecies.github.io/pdfs/NeuralCorrelates.pdf
sooheon 6y ago
Interesting theory, the article largely agrees with you. I'll add that "others" can include future selves, in which case the evolutionary benefit becomes clear. The capacity to model one's current state is recursive and superfluous, but the ability to model one's future potential states is essential to planning.

once-in-a-while 6y ago

It didn't. If everything (starting from nothing/nil/void) can be explained using "only" 6000 years (read the Bible), why are some people desperately trying to do exactly the following: We already /have/ a program which solves every detail perfectly, and uses only 6000 LOC. Now someone who denies the existence of God, wakes up some morning and tries to replace the perfect 6000 LOC with a 20.000.000(!!) LOC program, which is unbearably slow, doesn't even come close to solve anything of the original problem (only creates illusions of that), gets buggier by the month, and is only a waste of everyone's precious time? If the foundation (read: Faith) is wrong, anything built on it will crumble, given enough time... (we are watching a film here).

tus88 6y ago

I thought it was discovered by Descartes? My Phil is a bit rusty so go easy on me.

gomjabbar 6y ago

I like the Gom Jabbar theory: "You are never more alive, more awake, more conscious, than when in excruciating conflict with yourself" https://www.rifters.com/crawl/?p=791 https://www.rifters.com/crawl/?p=791

hyperpallium2 6y ago

Regarding the self-model, when we "identify" with a person, a fictional character, a group, an idea or an ideal, how literally true can it be?

pulkitsh1234 6y ago

Anyone overlooking the ancient Indian philosophical (or spiritual depending on the way you look at it) literature, a.k.a The Upanishads, is being ignorant about consciousness studies. The term "Chit" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cit_(consciousness) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cit_(consciousness)) was introduced by The Upanishads for referring to consciousness/awareness long before any of the modern philosophers did so. For more info: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yfUXXKB_G_Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yfUXXKB_G_Q

yeaman1231 6y ago
good luck mate, I (used to be one of those people) always run into people in tech that treat science as a religion (scientism) and simply refuse to look at philosophical traditions of their own culture (save for foreign cultures) because of their narrow modern conception of religion. On a separate note, I am interested in comparative theology (traditions in general) and the link you mentioned seems very interesting, thank you ---- Edit: For context: grew up in the middle east and living in California now, studied a ton about middle eastern theology and western theology, would love more resources on the east
srtjstjsj 6y ago
Your comment would be much better with out the needless antagonisic first sentence.

galacticaactual 6y ago

Do mushrooms. You will know, will no longer care, and want to maximize the application of said consciousness to the world.

mr_eggcup_teste 6y ago

Why it evolved right here on HN of course.

LatteLazy 6y ago

As far as I can tell, consciousness is just empathy for the self. I am conscious of myself in the same way I'm conscious of others (he's happy, he's angry, he's reliable etc). Of course being conscious of (and empathetic towards) others is a vital part of being a complex social animal like humans. So consciousness as we experience it is just a side effect of empathy which is selected for by evolution because it allows the sort of complex and limited cooperation humans use to survive. I have never seen anyone else say any of this. So maybe I'm missing some deeper revelation...

tsimionescu 6y ago
What you're describing is a tiny part of consciousness, and even that is hard to explain in this way. The way we empathize with others is exactly the opposite of what you describe - we notice certain outwards appearances and we imagine how we would have to feel to display the same, and so we identify their state as equivalent to what we have felt in the past. This is one reason why it is hard to empathize with situations that are way outside of our own lived experiences. Even this observation alone makes your argument dubious to me. But it is much harder to expand this argument to our ability to visualize situations, to experience sensations as they come, to feel joy or sadness or helplessness etc in the first place. My own belief (I don't believe we can say anything really scientific about this subject yet) is that consciousness will turn out to be a natural consequence of how a generally intelligent algorithm interacts with information, some necessary internal state. Most likely, as AI will advance in the next couple of centuries, we will be able to start observing this internal state in the first animal-level intelligence AIs.

qubex 6y ago

I’m personally fascinated by Julian Jaynes’ The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind that posits that humans had an innate ability to reason linguistically but that it was disjointed from their everyday living experience until some point in the historical record. Richard Dawkins famously commented “It is one of those books that is either complete rubbish or a work of consummate genius; Nothing in between! Probably the former, but I'm hedging my bets.’. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicameralism_(psychology) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicameralism_(psychology)

Viliam1234 6y ago
You might be interested in the Slate Star Codex review: https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/06/01/book-review-origin-of-consciousness-in-the-breakdown-of-the-bicameral-mind/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/06/01/book-review-origin-of-...
srtjstjsj 6y ago
Even the intro / historical section is fascinating. The book really shows how hard the problem is, as it reviews approaches throughoutout history that appear very strong until he pokes holes in then.

xtiansimon 6y ago

From The Atlantic article: "In the AST [...] was further adapted to model the attentional states of others, to allow for social prediction. Not only could the brain attribute consciousness to itself, it began to attribute consciousness to others." On the face of it this AST theory would nicely support Susan Blackmore's work on the `meme`. Recall Dawkins first proposed the meme, because he thought the gene was such a powerful mechanism there must be other similarly algorithmic mechanisms in nature. In her 1999 book on the subject Blackmore proposed the theory `imitation` is at the heart of the evolution of human theory of mind "...if you want to know whether that huge male gorilla is likely to attack you if you try to mate with this attractive female, you should try to imagine what you would do in the same situation." (Blackmore, 73.3) "'Arms races' are common in biology, as when predators evolve to run ever faster to catch their faster prey, or parasites evolve to outwit the immune systems of their hosts." (Blackmore, 74.2) "The turning point was when early hominids began to imitate each other. The origins of imitation itself are lost in our far past, but the selective (genetic) advantage of imitation is no mystery. [...] If your neighbor has learned something really useful - like which foods to eat and which to avoid [...] it may pay (in biological terms) to copy him. You can then avoid all the slow and potentially dangerous process of trying out new foods for yourself." (Blackmore, 75.3) "I suggested imitation requires three skills: making decisions about what to imitate, complex transformations from one point of view to another, and the production of matching bodily actions. These basic skills, or at least the beginnings of them, are available in many primates and were probably available to our ancestors of 5 million years ago. Primates have good motor control and hand coordination, and good general intelligence which would enable them to classify actions and decide what to imitate. Some of them can imagine events and manipulate them mentally [...] and, most notably, they have [social intelligence] and the beginnings of a theory of mind." (Blackmore, 75.5) Seems this AST theory would offer Darwinian continuity and fill gaps in the qualitative theories of mind between other organisms and the exceptional human condition. Blackmore, Susan. The Meme Machine. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. (1999) Dawkins, Richard. The Selfish Gene. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. (1976)

TheMightyLlama 6y ago

As a proposal, would consciousness not come about once a species starts becoming _maladapted_ to its environment? As the population dies out only those with consciousness and... I hesitate to say... smarts survive. This would have to happen an untold number of times for us to get where we are today.

drshuch 6y ago

Through the elaboration of organic life, culminating in the evolution of humans. That is all we, in our position, can speculate about.

drshuch 6y ago

Through the evolution of organic life on earth, culminating in human development.

acephal 6y ago

> The tectum is a beautiful piece of engineering. To control the head and the eyes efficiently, it constructs something called an internal model, a feature well known to engineers. An internal model is a simulation that keeps track of whatever is being controlled and allows for predictions and planning. The tectum’s internal model is a set of information encoded in the complex pattern of activity of the neurons. That information simulates the current state of the eyes, head, and other major body parts, making predictions about how these body parts will move next and about the consequences of their movement. For example, if you move your eyes to the right, the visual world should shift across your retinas to the left in a predictable way. The tectum compares the predicted visual signals to the actual visual input, to make sure that your movements are going as planned. These computations are extraordinarily complex and yet well worth the extra energy for the benefit to movement control. In fish and amphibians, the tectum is the pinnacle of sophistication and the largest part of the brain. A frog has a pretty good simulation of itself. There is actually an immense amount of meditation on this very notion of an internal model, antecedent to the modern concept of consciousness we've been discussing since Kant, which guides a life form, from Aristotle down to St. Thomas Aquinas. See Daniel Heller-Roazen's "The Inner Touch: Archaeology of a Sensation"