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The idea that everything is conscious is gaining academic credibility (2018)
- charliebreslau 6y agoWhaaaaat... bs
- ncmncm 6y agoIn other news, academia is coming to accept that "consciousness" can have no objective definition. Users of outlying definitions that appear useful in their field thus have no need to invent a new word for their particular choice. In some cases the entire lack of any meaningful definition is the whole point of using the word. Lack of a definition, or agreement on a definition, has never been seen to be an impediment to publication, and that is ultimately what matters.
- fighterpilot 6y agoI got paywalled, can someone share an archive or outline link?
- Avshalom 6y agohttps://outline.com/8z79aN https://outline.com/8z79aN though the article isn't really anything more than a description of panpsychism, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panpsychism#Arguments_in_favor_of_panpsychism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panpsychism#Arguments_in_favor... and the Arguments Against section below that are basically a better version of the article
- nick_kline 6y agoSo consciousness is some kind of messy combination of matter, responding to inputs, to connections between particles. This feels wholly inadequate. My human consciousness is reduced when I get shot in the head but the particles are still there, so think about when my brain deteriorates, when I die. If you put my matter into a container all that matter is still there but I'm no longer able to have human consciousness (unless there is some kind of thing outside of physical laws, which I am not going to just jump to). So this feels like a useless definition. Like the computational power of something is a product of it's mass. It's much more than that.
- ojosilva 6y agoIt's not useless, it's a valid approach to study the subject. Consciousness here is downgraded to a very "simple form", to more fundamental components that all matter possess in a way or another. So it does not mean that a rock is sentient like your mind is. It's more like saying, ie, that quantum entanglement could be a component of consciousness. A rock could interact with quantum entanglement, therefore it would be plausible that a rock could have a tremendously primitive form of consciousness.
- perl4ever 6y agoYou can compute things by moving rocks around and placing them just so. (or using an abacus, etc) Therefore (if you accept that intelligence is computable) there could be an intelligent mind denoted by a sufficient number of rocks over a sufficient period of time, even if it took billions of years to have a thought. Whether "naturally" placed or by some agent. I think this is not original of me, but I forget the source.
- fighterpilot 6y agoThis is a key question. If we can replicate the information processing in 1 minute of brain activity by rearranging and moving rocks in a specific way over a 10 year period, would that arrangement of rocks have subject conscious states, or not? If yes, it's a good argument in support of panpsychism, because those conscious states would seem to be substrate-independent. And if not, why does the brain have subjective states but these rocks do not? What makes our wetware particularly special? There's clearly something profound going on here, even if it's currently beyond our ability to articulate properly within a scientific framework.
- Vampiero 6y agoFeedback. Our brains are circuits, rocks are not. No matter how hard you try, rocks are never going to rearrange themselves if left to sit. Self-organization is very common in nature, and I find it easy to believe that consciousness is an emergent process that necessarily encompasses some level of self-organization.
- milesvp 6y agoI think it’s important to think of consciousness as a spectrum. Having studied artificial life, the conclusion I came to is that something needs to be situated and have some degree of nervous system to be conscious. A rock is not concious, but a tree might be. A fly is less concious than a dog. A robot may be concious if it has enough sensors to react and significantly change it’s behavior due to processing (rather than simple bump or range sensors acting as limiters). But really at the end of the day, it’s sort of a bullshit word people tend to use to imply that humans are somehow special beyond just having an insane number of neurons pound for pound.
- spiritplumber 6y agoReminds me of Gaia from Asimov's Foundation.
- m0llusk 6y agoRock consciousness seems like a potentially interesting special case. If a rock perceives and reacts to its environment by being selected and crafted into a tool by a human might it then claim to be living in a hologram universe?
- sadness3 6y agoSilicon, for example.
- strofcon 6y agoSeems they're playing fast and loose with the word "credibility".
- yongjik 6y ago...and also with the word "gaining".
- zeeshanqureshi 6y agoWrong ideas can often hold academic credibility. Not saying this particular idea is right or wrong, just that academic credibility may not mean much when it comes to matters of mind of which we may never really know much about. A rock could very well be conscious, or not. Let us say that (by someone's definition) it is, what then? Someone else is not going to agree that it is. Is there an objective definition? Can it be experimentally verified? Uncertainty is the only certainty.
- dang 6y agoDiscussed, rather poorly, at the time: The idea that all things are conscious is gaining academic credibility - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16251441 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16251441 - Jan 2018 (17 comments)
- chrisco255 6y agoWell the age of reason was nice while it lasted. "I think therefore I am," is rather outdated. We should adopt this new age paradigm of which Descartes could not hope to have discovered in his primitive time: "It is, therefore it thinks."
- colanderman 6y agoI don't think there's any need to invoke as "magical" an idea as consciousness being a "fundamental property of matter" to reach the conclusion that many more things than we think are conscious. A 10,000 ft view of the human brain includes: memory, emotional state, sensory input, ability to monitor and control internal processes including memory and emotion, motor control, and a logical system to tie these together as a system that attempts to achieve internal goals guided by memory and emotional state. Other mammalian and animal brains generally are presumably very similar. What I don't understand is the need to invoke a je ne sais quoi -- a soul, quantum mechanics, whatever pseudo-matter the article is talking about -- to explain consciousness. Why should the above processes themselves not be sufficient to give rise to what we experience as consciousness, as an emergent phenomenon? It's not in everything, but it's in everything that has more-or-less all the pieces above. We could even make a crude consciousness, with today's technology. It's like if, in trying to understand the essence of language, after analyzing lexical and grammatical structure and successfully describing all the visible parts of a language, linguists just shrugged and said "well this is how English works but don't know what makes it a language... there must be something invisible that is key". Well no, it turns out it is just the parts we can see and describe that are sufficient. We can even make one by putting those parts together (Esperanto... despite some linguists who do -- bizarrely, to me -- claim it lacks a "je ne sais quoi"...) and it acts just like a real "language". I guess what's tricky is, unlike language, there's no way to "inhabit" an artificial consciousness to try it out and see if it really is "real". Many humans don't believe animals are conscious despite overwhelming biological and behavioral similarities. What sort of test of an artificial consciousness would not be hand-waved away as merely a simulacrum? One might even say the only falsifiable definition of a conscious entity -- other humans included -- is whether it has similar enough brain-parts as yourself.
- akomtu 6y agoBecause the above processes are too slow. Our society has a slow framework to move physical goods around and a layer above where we move information around at a much higher pace. That upper layer can be called a soul of our society.
- thatguymike 6y ago
- EMM_386 6y agoI personally believe in the theory of panpsychism but it raises so many crazy questions. What defines an object? If everything is just a sea of atoms where precisely is that boundary that says "this is a rock, and it as a whole is conscious". If I take a chip off that rock, do we now have two distinct conscious entities? If I cold weld two huge pieces of steel together so they fuse at an atomic level, did I just turn two independent slabs of steel into one larger conscious entity? When does it become one entity? When the first atom between the two is fused together, or does it become "more" conscious as I continue to weld it together? The rabbit hole goes deep with the concept of consciousness.
- beaconstudios 6y agoyou might be interested in emergentism and constructivism as I believe they provide useful concrete answers to your questions. Panpsychism falls into the slippery question of defining what "consciousness" is; emergentism provides the frameworks of cybernetics and systems theory to approach many philosophical issues, and can be applied in a panpsychism-ish way by using the concept of self-organisation and adaptation to the environment as the scale for "consciousness". constructivism says that our experience of reality is based in our perceptions and our labels for things are just useful mental models. An object is defined by how we use it - a chair is a thing you sit on, for example. The ship of theseus is whatever theseus uses to travel the river regardless of the planks it is made of. I've not yet run into any internal contradictions in this worldview, which is the stick by which I measure sensemaking model efficacy.
- perl4ever 6y agoI don't think the question you are asking is specific to consciousness. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sorites_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sorites_paradox
- tayo42 6y agoIs there a good place on the internet to read and discuss philosophical stuff like consciousness? Also, I'd take any book suggestions, I just finished consciousness explained and currently reading on consciousness. It's hard to find good books
- xyzzy21 6y agoWe do NOT understand our own consciousness so it's idiotic to project what we don't even understand to inanimate objects. This is superstition and anti-rationality. The right answer can always be "we don't know" but this is deciding "nope, we can just make shit up because it feels good!" Basically taking civilization backwards by hundreds if not thousands of years!
- epilys 6y agoI'm reading the Bicameral Mind book by Jaynes and regardless of the "mind-body problem solution" it posits it has a good overview on the problem of consciousness at the beginning of the book
- skhm 6y agoPermutation City by Greg Egan - it's fiction, but honestly it will do as good a job as any textbook on the subject to force you to really think about your beliefs about the nature of consciousness.
- jasfi 6y agoI think that the quality of consciousness is a good fit for brains. If a plant has consciousness it doesn't mean that much because there isn't anything like the brain to experience things. Although I have read that they may have very basic sensing structures.
- mrkramer 6y agoMy assumptions are: Consciousness is a property of living begins. Consciousness is a feature of neurological construct such as brain or a feature of any other construct that we yet don't know of. Level of intelligence is directly proportional to reaching consciousness. Further on to elaborate I think consciousness depends on intelligence; the more intelligent a living organism is there is higher probability it will reach a point of consciousness which nobody knows where and when exactly is. If primitive living organisms show patterns of conscious like behavior it does not mean they have consciousness because they live by the rules that are encoded and heritable. Such individuals have no control or awareness over their behavior and are not aware of itself and its surroundings. They reproduce or replicate and are subject to the biological forces of natural selection, with the payoffs of the game(life) representing reproductive success (biological fitness). See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionarily_stable_strategy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionarily_stable_strategy People should note that there is a difference between mimicking intelligence(consciousness) and actually having it. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room