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The problem of consciousness (or the quality of something being able to experience itself and things around it), may never be solved. Even if the reductionist a
by hliyan 5y ago
The problem of consciousness (or the quality of something being able to experience itself and things around it), may never be solved. Even if the reductionist approach reveals some fundamental field or particle that gives rise to consciousness (which is very unlikely), it just shifts the problem from the brain's neural network and into that phenomenon.
An old Julian Jaynes analogy comes to mind: if you're a flashlight, you will never be able to understand light, because wherever you look, light will be there. By definition you're unable to look at something that is dark. You perceive the world as being bathed in perpetual light.
The closest we might get may be a hand-wavy form of panpsychism, with some probable connection to quantum fluctuations.
- thanatos519 5y agoThe less hand-wavy form of panpsychism is called IIT: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_information_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_information_theory
- hliyan 5y agoInteresting! So basically: the basic unit of consciousness (whatever you may call it) is an intrinsic property of matter (or energy or particles?) and the more complex information systems matter forms, a more detailed model of the physical world emerges with that system, and the system experiences said model? I only did a quick reading so I may be misinterpreting the theory.
- jw1224 5y agoYou are the universe experiencing itself.
- collyw 5y agoPart of the universe. There are vast parts of it that I am not experiencing.
- gremlinsinc 5y agoWhat if everyone living or has lived is but a subconscious of the universe, and so you are experiencing them, you just aren't aware of it - in the moment?
- mellosouls 5y agoDiscussed in the article itself.
- bserge 5y agoI don't see a problem to solve there. Every conscious creation has a limited number of sensors and limited processing capacity to work with, as such they can be recreated with enough research and resources. The flashlight in that example will never experience darkness, just like we will never experience lower or higher dimensions. Or dare I say, a different galaxy. But we could simulate them, so that's also experience, even if not accurate. Imo, an autonomous robot/car would be no less conscious than a cow. The experience is simply limited by the hardware/software available.
- andybak 5y agoIt's so strange to read comments from people who think there's nothing to explain. It must be just as strange for those people to hear from the other side of the debate. To me it seems so obvious that there's an explanatory gap between any functional explanation of behaviour and information processing - and the feeling of experiencing something. The various thought experiments around p-zombies crystalises this for me.
- mypalmike 5y agoWhat gap are you speaking of though? Do you suspect there is some as yet undiscovered fundamental quantity of the universe which lay dormant for billions of years until the human form evolved to make use of it?
- andybak 5y ago> Do you suspect there is some as yet undiscovered fundamental quantity of the universe which lay dormant for billions of years until the human form evolved to make use of it? No idea. That's not what I'm discussing here. The gap is the fact that I indisputably experience things that happen to me. I feel them. There is an "I" to talk about that has genuine meaning in a way that it wouldn't do if a fictional character or a computer programming used the word. It's possible to imagine a form of life as complex as ours with functioning societies where non of the lifeforms experienced the world as an "I". Maybe ants don't have an "I". NPCs in a video game or GPT3 almost certainly don't. At some point GPTx or video game NPCs might become as complex or behaviourly rich as a real person but still lack an "I". This is a p-zombie. The "gap" I'm referring to is the difference beween similar entities, one of which experiences qualia when the other doesn't.
- berndi 5y agoI think you are confusing science with philosophy. In science, solving a problem amounts to building a (quantitative) theory that allows us to predict phenomena and outcomes in the real world. We say that we have understood a phenomenon when we have a self-consistent theory that makes predictions validated in experiments. The ultimate question of "why" reality behaves in a way that is congruent with a given theory is left to philosophers. Your claim that a theory of consciousness would simply "shift the problem" is only true with respect to these philosophic (arguably unscientific) types of questions. Consider the problem of gravity. Very coarsely, we have moved from Aristotle's theory of gravity: the natural place of things is on the ground and things like to stay in their natural place, to Newtonian gravity: objects are attracted with a force that is proportional to the product of their masses, to general relativity: objects follow geodesics in curved spacetime, with the curvature determined by the energy content of space. Our grasp on gravity has certainly improved greatly, but the "why" questions have simply been shifted. Consciousness is a natural phenomenon and as such can be subject to scientific study. The ultimate question of why the laws of nature are as they are is not part of this project and is best entertained after closing time.
- malka 5y agoConsciousness is not observable. Gravity is.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- pmoriarty 5y agoAnother problem is that many of the people arguing about this don't agree on what it means to "understand" or "explain" something. Is it enough to get a majority of scientists, researchers, and/or philosophers to agree on something, or have it published in some prestigious journals for us to pat ourselves on the back and consider the subject "understood"? I have no doubt that such agreement on this subject could be attained, as people are good at convincing themselves and each other of stuff, and it's not inconceivable that it'll happen again regarding consciousness at some point. However, will that mean that we've really understood it, or merely convinced ourselves that we did? The same goes for explanations. What counts as an adequate explanation? Are a certain number of successful predictions enough? Is an elegant equation that accounts for all of the data enough? Or do we require something more? This is where the disagreements come in, as when it comes to experience equations, journal articles, and scientists patting each other on the back as having "understood" it doesn't seem to be enough for many participants in this controversy, and some argue it'll never be enough because there is something special about experience that transcends all that. That's why articles that point to some new discovery about neuron function or results of experiments on the brain can be seen as laughable before even reading them. On this view no fruit of the scientific enterprise, or even philosophy, can touch what it's like to experience the world.