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This is a common attempt to rationalize away the hard problem of consciousness that I find to be an almost textbook example of "begging the question". What is a

• wombatmobile 6y ago
  How do you know there is a difference between a conscious being and a glass of water? I'm not saying the glass of water is conscious. Let's say it isn't. What tells you that an animal is any different?
  • mdeck_ 6y ago
    This is yet another philosophical problem: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/other-minds/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/other-minds/
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  • GoblinSlayer 6y ago
    Another good analogy here is definition of life. What is life and what is a difference between a living being and a glass of water? The difference is that they are different systems that work in different ways, for a system to be conscious, it should work in a certain way, and a glass of water doesn't work in that way, that's why it's not conscious. Consciousness should perceive reality, remember, model and analyze it, maybe even have intelligence, will, abstract thought, attention and reflection, then it can be seen as consciousness.
  • kobe_bryant 6y ago
    because we have neurons and a glass of water doesnt
    • selfsimilar 6y ago
      Are you sure that neurons are a precondition for consciousness? I'm not arguing a glass fo water is conscious, but that argues against computers ever being conscious because they also have no neurons.
      • kobe_bryant 6y ago
        thats true, I guess theyre not required for consciousness but thats how it evolved here on Earth. I suppose all you would need is to be able to have a mental map of the world, however it happens
      • morpheos137 6y ago
        I think computers could be conscious (whatever that means) if they modelled living minds to a sufficiently high degree of precision. I do not see why the physical substrate would matter.
  • telmo 6y ago
    I don't know if a glass of water is conscious or not, nor can I come up with a scientific experience to test such an hypothesis, so I remain agnostic on that question. In fact, I cannot even come up with a scientific experience to test if other people are conscious. I just bet they are, because they are similar to me and I know I am. My point is simply that "feeling" already assumes consciousness. Maybe everything is conscious. Still, saying "it's just a feeling" explains nothing. Most people assume that glasses of water are not conscious, so I just used that example to illustrate my point. But you make a valid remark.
    • prox 6y ago
      The perfect example of : dubito, ergo cogito, ergo sum ("I doubt, therefore I think, therefore I am")
      • telmo 6y ago
        Indeed!
      • Der_Einzige 6y ago
        I hadn't scrolled down this far when I brought up the cogito myself - but I guess great minds think alike. But, I think Descartes is straight up wrong here. He doesn't doubt, he believes that he doubts. Descartes never got away from his evil demon - it simply blinded him. He didn't take radical skepticism far enough and if he did he would realize that the Cogito is not good enough for a proof of ontology! The universe of the evil skepticism demon is as follows: "There is exactly one truth, that there are no other truths". If you hold that axiom, than how can one unironically conclude that the cogito is a neat proof of ontology? Seems like the philosophical equivalent of "wet pavement causes rain"
        • prox 6y ago
          What do you offer as the difference between the belief that he doubts and “actual” doubt. For him the doubt seems actual and acute. He doesn’t believe in the doubt, he is experiencing it. (Also Descartes never said doubt, that is a common addition)
  • tcgv 6y ago
    This crosses my mind from time to time, what physical properties sustain conciousness? Our brains, which is where we suppose our conciousness originates, is made (most likely) from the same sub-atomic particles inanimate objects are made of. So is there something more to these inanimate objects? Does a rock has more potential then we are aware of? I don't know. Funny question to ask though.
    • Koshkin 6y ago
      > sub-atomic particles Mostly whole atoms (or ions) plus electrons and protons (although the latter could be thought of as the ion of a particular isotope of hydrogen). Being pedantic, we can include photons, too.
• otikik 6y ago
  I read it as "it is a physiological signal". Like the need to pee.
  • telmo 6y ago
    Sure, but the hard part is explaining the first person experience of feeling the need to pee or, in other words, consciousness.
    • otikik 6y ago
      I get it, but that is what I ment. That "first person" is just a group of neurons experiencing a signal. Call it what you will: "On". Or "I am". I think about it as "Still connected", given that people who lose significant parts of their brain still "feel alive". When those neurons stop receiving it, the sense of self gradually stops. I also think that one of the reasons we need sleeping is to recharge the signal emitters; that's why we lose consciousness in the process. I must stress that I am not an expert in neorology at all, I just have thought about this for a while. Obviously when I say "a signal" as if it was a digital 1 or 0, evolution will probably have implemented bunch of chemicals and electrons being interchanged at different times at different places.
• bko 6y ago
  How about consciousness is just compression? I was fascinated by a paper that argues the compression conjecture: the idea that consciousness is indistinguishable from compression. I just finished putting down my thoughts on the matter this morning [1]. This paper addresses "the hard problem of consciousness" directly: > The answer to this question lies in the realization that the hypothesis of Amy’s subjective experience is a hypothesis which Amy herself holds, an understanding which is manifested through the compression she carries out. Understanding the hypothesis that one is feeling something and the actual experience of feeling are the same thing. Amy’s feeling therefore exists relative to the assumption of her own existence, an assumption which the system itself is capable of making [0] https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/297030798.pdf https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/297030798.pdf [1] https://mleverything.substack.com/p/consciousness-as-compression-part-e60 https://mleverything.substack.com/p/consciousness-as-compres...
  • jstanley 6y ago
    > Therefore, we can represent consciousness as a program that receives some input and performs some compression. Are you of the opinion that gzip is conscious? When I execute gzip is it aware that it's compressing things? If so, why do you think that? If not, I don't understand the argument that consciousness and compression are the same thing.
    • bko 6y ago
      It's not my theory, but check out the paper. > Chairs do not carry out compression. They do not source sensory information from multiple locations and process it in parallel. They do not store memories to enhance future compression. And they do not develop a theory of self by compressing their own actions. Therefore they are not conscious > Imagine holding a flame to the leg of a chair. The flame leaves a black mark, therefore the chair has certainly been affected by the flame. But intuitively, it does not seem reasonable to claim that the chair has experienced the flame. This difference between effect and experience is directly related to compression: specifically, the chair fails to experience the flame because the information it provides is not compressed in any way. If a chair’s leg is burned it has no effect on any of the other legs. No information is communicated, and consequently there is no inter-leg data compression to bind the experiences of the chair together. Furthermore, the chair stores no memory (other than a black mark). The burning event has no effect on how subsequent events are processed, meaning that the experiences of the chair are not bound together across time. Finally, because the chair does not compress its own response to the flame, it has no awareness of any subjective experience Similarly, gzip does not develop a theory of self. It just compresses data based on some algorithm. It doesn't learn, have a sense of self or internalize its action https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/297030798.pdf https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/297030798.pdf
• Der_Einzige 6y ago
  We should not assume that the appearances of experience is proof of well... anything, and especially not of existence of experience. The classic example of where I think people f*** this up is with unironically accepting "Cogito Ergo Sum" or "I think, therefor I am". I'm surprised that blade runner didn't give folks intuition for why this might be wrong. Funny enough though, many people have tried to boil down consciousness to be some "simple" concept like the original author with "consciousness is just a feeling". I'm reminded of when Sartre writes all about it in Being and Nothingness: "All of consciousness is consciousness of something"
• ta1234567890 6y ago
  > Saying that "consciousness is just a feeling" is equivalent to saying that "consciousness is just consciousness". It may sound like and explanation, but it is just a tautology. I think you hit the nail in the head with that. Consciousness might very well just be a tautology, so the only definitions we are going to be able to produce are going to be circular or recursive. However, this is a problem with written language in general. The definition of any word is only provided in the form of other words, which themselves are defined by words as well, so without an interpreter/reader that makes a connection from language to something else, language by itself can’t really have any meaning.
  • loveistheanswer 6y ago
    Perhaps consciousness cant know itself, just like fire can't burn itself, and water can't wet itself.
    • ta1234567890 6y ago
      Or perhaps consciousness means being conscious of being conscious ;) Ps: love your username
• jancsika 6y ago
  It's clearly not a tautology. It's a basic scientific approach: > You reduce it down to something much more biological, like basic feelings, and then you start building up the complexities. Author is attempting to "build up the the complexities" from discrete falsifiable parts. There's great and obvious benefit to that. One obvious drawback is that it may not succeed in adequately addressing the complexity suggested by the history of philosophy of consciousness. But that in no way makes it a tautology.
  • andybak 6y ago
    I think you've overlooked something here. > You reduce it down to something much more biological, like basic feelings, and then you start building up the complexities. But at this point we're not even sure if the thing you're referring to is the same thing we originally intended to study. This is one of the pitfalls of scientific discussions of consciousness. Usually the first reductionist step appears to substitute the subject under discussion for something entirely different and then proceeds to explain this other thing. "Assume a spherical cow" and all that.
• morpheos137 6y ago
  The "hard problem" is only a problem at all because it is ill defined. I don't get why many people think the hard problem is a problem. We think therefore we are. What would a solution to the so called (I argue non-existent) hard problem look like? Why is the hard problem a problem? What new, useful information would "solving" it deliver? Ah since we know why humans share a common qualia for red now we can do X? I don't get it. Attempting to rationalise away an irrational premise, i.e. a hard problem exists, is always going to fail to convince believers. What is the point in attempting to define something that is ill-defined to start with? Here is my position. Consciousness is a word. What it means varies over time and and space and according to who uses it. The mental model of who uses it may or may not correspond to objective reality in a broad or narrow sense. Magic is a word too. Just because we can explain N magic tricks does that mean that there is some "essence" of magic that is left unexplainable, i.e. the hard problem of magic? Just because we can come up with words for things does not mean that we actually know what we are talking about. I think "consciousness" as a word is not concretely defined therefore I am sceptical of a single unified natural phenomenon underlying the word. Giving a mental model a name does not necessarily give it reality.
  • RichardCA 6y ago
    The way I get out of that conundrum is to ask what would happen if the Earth were destroyed in some cataclysmic event and there were no humans left. I mean do you agree that the universe would still exist? Do you think some other life in the universe might have consciousness, even if it's organized in a way that would be unrecognizable to us? How would you go about examining that question? Carl Sagan spent a lot of time looking for ways to pose that question in ways that make it possible to "do science" about it and not just trail off into ideas that are beyond discussion, beyond meaning. I mean if you are looking at a planet to see if the surface has been worked in a way that proves the existence of a technology-capable species (even if it was long extinct), you're talking about something "real" at that point. Also, the book "Solaris" by Stanislaw Lem is really wonderful in the way it evokes the mystery of how a being can be sentient and utterly non-comprehensible to us. Quite brilliant really.
    • 6y ago
• imbnwa 6y ago
  I feel like the greater problem is that we use the word 'consciousness' at all; the very term is undefined and acting like its a term we can build a science on is just as flimsy as saying its a feeling
• ejklake 6y ago
  You may be surprised to learn that there is more to the theory than is conveyed in the headline to the Nautilus Q&A with the scientist who came up with it. A more accurate statement of Solms's view is that consciousness is precision adjustment within a hierarchical network of Markov blankets that self-organise to minimise free energy. You can judge for yourself whether he avoids tautology or rationalises away the hard problem, but you should probably first read his book, in which he explains the idea. Remarkably, given that this is a book about predictive coding in the brain, it is not all that taxing to read. What's more, as far as I can see, it does in fact solve the problem.