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Personally, it amazes me how many people find it difficult to believe or accept, that human consciousness would just be an emergent property of how neural cells

by sampo 5y ago

Personally, it amazes me how many people find it difficult to believe or accept, that human consciousness would just be an emergent property of how neural cells function and are connected together. That all of human consciousness would reside on a higher level than the laws of molecular physics and chemistry. That consciousness emerges from the level of cell biology. No need to postulate anything supernatural, or anything outside current physics and chemistry. Just interactions on the biological level. It seems surprisingly common that people don't accept this "boring" explanation, but go to search for explanations outside of the known laws of physics.

tracedddd 5y ago
The implications are uncomfortable both existentially and ethically, so people will go to great lengths to search for evidence of the contrary.
- mvcalder 5y ago
  Or, most people’s subjective experience provides constant overwhelming evidence of the contrary.
snarfy 5y ago
As a software guy I think of it as trying to understand the execution of a complex web app by examining the machine instructions. At that level, how things happen is very apparent but why they do is pretty much lost.
- Koshkin 5y ago
  Except that the web app has not evolved naturally, i.e. by itself, from the machine instructions, like many emergent phenomena have.
hsn915 5y ago
Would it not surprised you if you learned that the program you wrote in C++ and compiled to machine code would produce "subjective" feelings in the CPU when executed?
- avaer 5y ago
  It wouldn't surprise me to learn that my CPU had feelings, if the CPU was created in a million year evolutionary process in which the lack of appropriate subjective feelings would have resulted in its death.
  - hsn915 5y ago
    I'm talking about the current CPU. > if the CPU was created in a million year evolutionary process in which the lack of appropriate subjective feelings would have resulted in its death. You can say that about flying too. If the CPU was created in a billion year evolutionary process in which the lack of ability to flight would result in its death, the CPUs would fly. Like, how is this relevant? Can flight be properly explained in terms of signals flowing through a CPU? Yes or no?
- foxhop 5y ago
  Sure if it's badly written the CPU could get hot and all the side effects of running the code, maybe it's a virus. if the machine has consciousness of thought and not just continuity of data, it would feel pretty bad with it's sensors (maybe even some total pain threshold metric) and might even cry or complain to a near by sentient being for help. The problem is it may only speak to other beings of the same abstraction level, or higher and the listening being has to notice, have empathy, and the skillet to fix it.
- mynegation 5y ago
  Depends on definition of “feelings”. I can define a “feeling” of a CPU as its temperature, whether it is rising or going down, which does not sound too wild because CPU may react to it and decrease its frequency or shut off some cores. How about cache usage patterns that are literally coping mechanism with the necessity to access main memory?
- morpheos137 5y ago
  If the program was coded to produce subjective feeling, no. Otherwise, it would suprise me very much. I believe what we call consciousness is selected for and is written into the structure our brains have. I do not beleive that consciouness exists outside of living brains. Maybe I am wrong but so far there has not been much evidence. I also do not believe consciousness is simply an accident but that it was specifically selected for by evolution. People who have taken psychedelics may disagree but I think consciouness is tightly connected with sense of self, the ego. An organism that is conscious can have a sense of self. An organism with a sense of self may have a greater degree of flexible self preservation / flexible self promotion than a simple stimulus response network. Because we are conscious we focus on what we are feeling about our selves not just on the immediate sensory stimulus. Pyschedelics may break down the connection / integration of senses with self giving rise to the illusion of consciousness outside of the self-brain. But I would say this is an illusion.
vermilingua 5y ago
This solution isn’t ignored because it’s boring, but because it isn’t rigorous enough. If consciousness just is an emergent property of the function of neural cells, define function, define neural cells? What is the lowest level of complexity of each that allows consciousness? Why only neural cells, that is if it is only neural cells at all? By the anthropic principle it is a given that consciousness arises from the function of neural cells, but that isn’t a satisfying answer because it doesn’t actually answer anything.
- skohan 5y ago
  Idk I tend to think it is rigorous enough, and maybe the fact that we don't intuitively believe it's rigorous enough is an artifact of an evolved spiritual impulse. It seems to me consciousness is something we have to have to exist the way that we do. In order for the human animal to function, we need to understand the past, predict the future, understand the motivations of others and come up with stories about the world we use to convince others and facilitate collaboration. Human society wouldn't be possible without consciousness, and I don't see more explanation needed than the idea that we evolved this ability for our brains to talk to themselves in this certain way through the series of selective pressures which lead us to where we are today. Other animals probably have some version of this at varying levels of complexity, and somewhere along the line you could probably draw a line and say a slug with 15 neurons probably is more of a biological machine, and doesn't have anything you could describe as consciousness or subjective experience. Maybe you even need a pretty advanced brain with a neocortex to allow for subjective experience. I don't know why some "spooky stuff" is needed, or why some reach for consciousness to be a property which arises in individual cells. I think it's probably a very complex thing which arises from very complex structures consisting of millions or billions of neurons.
  - maverick-iceman 5y ago
    There are various degrees of consciousness, awareness and abstraction capabilities between humans as well. The smarter the human, the more conscious and aware they are about the surroundings, the higher their ability to create and understand abstract concepts etc. Is this just the product of more numerous neurons? Better connected neurons? Higher density neurons in some areas of the brain? Is number of neurons correlated with IQ and in turn correlated to degree of consciousness and abstraction? We don't know yet, but it seems better advised to start looking at the base biological components first vs "spooky stuff"
francasso 5y ago
I don't find it that difficult, in fact yours is just as much of a belief as the one of the people you subtly criticize. You believe that the standard model and gravity (or whatever unknown theory that can have some experimental evidence to generalize both) are enough to model the behavior of human beings/animal as an "emergent" phenomena, even though there is no direct evidence for that. Even worse actually, there is no mathematical model.
- eurasiantiger 5y ago
  There are various models that could possibly be developed to accurately account for the emergent complexity we experience. Dimensionality of causal sets and Wolfram’s recent research into causal graphs come to mind.
- roywiggins 5y ago
  Emergent phenomena are often hard to predict, like the weather. That doesn't actually tell us a whole lot about the underlying physics, it seems to me. The halting problem is an emergent property of turing machines, and we know mathematically that the behavior of a Turing machine cannot usually be predicted or mathematically modeled without just running it. The mathematical underpinnings of superconductivity are still in flux, but there's still every reason to believe that it's an emergent phenomenon from known physics. I don't see any obvious reason why consciousness can't be something like that.
  - francasso 5y ago
    I don't think either of those examples is in the same category as consciousness, or actually lets stick to "modeling of human and animal behavior", because I don't know what you mean by consciousness since we all have a feeling for what it is but there is no good precise definition, or framework in which you could give one. In both examples you made we do in fact have good mathematical descriptions that allow us to describe the system and the way it works, and moreover we can infer/predict non obvious things about it. Do you know of anything similar that can be applied to human/animal behavior?
dandanua 5y ago
This boring explanation is in the framework of classical physics. Quantum physics is very different. In QM, physical objects don't have definite states until observed. Any observation requires an observer. So, we have that states are relative to observers. But what is observer? It is our consciousness in the first place.
- NavinF 5y ago
  > But what is observer? It is our consciousness You fell for a ruse. Your phone can use its camera to observe quantum phenomena such as shot noise just fine. Observations have nothing to do with consciousness.
  - dandanua 5y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Von_Neumann%E2%80%93Wigner_interpretation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Von_Neumann%E2%80%93Wigner_int...
dominicl 5y ago
Would love to discuss this over drinks. For me it's the opposite. It's feels pretty natural to me to imagine that intelligence and (perceived) free will are emergent properties. But consciousness troubles me, we still can't prove for anyone but ourselves that it does in fact exist - while it's existance is "apparent" to oneself. Also it does not make logical sense to me why such a feature should even develop, why have consciousness if you can have intelligence and problem solving without it? Loved the discussion between Lex Friedmann and Sam Harris on this very topic: https://youtu.be/4dC_nRYIDZU https://youtu.be/4dC_nRYIDZU
- BoiledCabbage 5y ago
  > Also it does not make logical sense to me why such a feature should even develop, why have consciousness if you can have intelligence and problem solving without it? Who/what says that you can? Consciousness seems to make most sense as a sliding scale than as a sudden switch. But even if you do argue that it's optional with intelligence, the reason it would be present would simply be: is the most efficient way to implement it.
roberttod 5y ago
At what point does it immerge? What is the smallest unit? Is it a magic number of neurons, or when they get arranged in a certain way? There's a mystery in these questions, and I think that's well accepted. I've heard this "emergent property" explanation before but it seems kind of a handwavey way of avoiding answering any questions. "It just appears when you have enough neurons" is probably true but how?!
- Koshkin 5y ago
  The "degree" of consciousness is certainly a function of the number of neurons functionally specialized for this particular purpose.
  - denton-scratch 5y ago
    Is your "certainly" analogous to the way young folk today use the word "literally"?
    - Koshkin 5y ago
      As in "no doubt."
- edanm 5y ago
  > "It just appears when you have enough neurons" is probably true but how?! Then you don't disagree with parent. You're saying that we don't know enough to fully explain consciousness, which I think everyone would agree with. Parent is just saying that our not understanding it is not because there's something outside of the known laws of physics that we're missing - we just don't know to understand how the laws of physics give rise to consciousness, but they do.
binbag 5y ago
People don't accept it because it doesn't solve the problem. The problem is why an experience is had by someone, not why there is a mind.
smokel 5y ago
I agree that it is amazing that people keep believing in obsolete theories, but it may not be all bad. In some areas of life, and to some people, very old theories have more explaining power than modern day science has. And they are often more comforting. If neural networks explain consciousness (which they may or may not do), then there are still some remaining issues to explain. For example, how can it be that our universe exists, and why are the laws of physics in place? And why are they so consistent? The consciousness problem may be unrelated to these problems about the fundamentals of science. It may well be that we can understand consciousness as a thing that exists entirely inside the laws of physics, but some people are not yet convinced. It may even be the case that the consciousness problem and the fundamental science problems are intrinsically related. Hence the interest in the combination of quantum mechanics and consciousness. One hint that points in this direction is that neural networks are a great basis for abstraction and logic. And by some coincidence this is exactly what can be used to form theories that explain everything we observe.
jcims 5y ago
'Emergent phenomena' is the 'draw the rest of the damn owl' of this conversation. It's doing way too much work to be useful. It's like saying that life is an emergent phenomena from condensed energy.
- Koshkin 5y ago
  It is as good as any sensible hypothesis: it allows us to focus on a more promising direction of research.
  - denton-scratch 5y ago
    A hypothesis is an unproved proposition that is actually susceptible to proof (or disproof). That is, it must make testable predictions. What predictions, testable in principle, are made by this "emergent phenomenon" hypothesis?
    - Koshkin 5y ago
      Well, philosophy is different from (positive) science in that regard. Yes, you have to realize that the notion of emergent phenomena belongs to philosophy, where a hypothesis (it can be said that philosophy consists of hypotheses) can only be "proven" indirectly, from relevant experience (such as scientific research).
- hnedeotes 5y ago
  It's more hand-wavy than it's admitted. When you think about it, the idea of emergent phenomena amounts to: - There's no underlying consciousness or conscious originator (no god, no panpsychism, no underlying conscious layer at the basis of reality, no nothing) - At some point, two or more elements (rocks, atoms, etc, that weren't conscious), aligned precisely in a given configuration and zap!, they became conscious and interactive - All consciousness then sprang from that. So the question would be, if systems favour inertia, stasis and conservation of energy, why would there be consciousness at all and just not an endless void, or a perfectly stable (as in homeostasis) system without conscious agents, or just rocks floating in the space. I'm not saying the idea of emergent phenomena is wrong, just that you better answer the complex questions other "supernatural" theories try to address, before declaring it some sort of obvious and correct answer.
alpaca128 5y ago
It's not difficult to accept that consciousness could be an emergent property, but it doesn't provide any insight. How do we get the abstraction layer of coherent thoughts from just a collection of neurons? We have no idea. Sure your explanation makes sense. But it's a bit like explaining the creation process of black holes with the words "they're an emergent property of gravity". It doesn't tell us anything, and if we want to understand it deeply we can't be satisfied with such a simple non-answer.
- davrosthedalek 5y ago
  I wouldn't call black holes "emergent". They do behave very similar to other gravitational objects -- just more "extreme". Another example are atoms: Most of their properties are easy to predict from the properties of their constituents and from the physical laws: The mass of atom is the sum of the mass of the constituents, minus the binding energy, which we can easily predict. But, for example, nucleon mass is emergent. Most of it is created dynamically by QCD, and we cannot easily predict it. We can, for example, not easily predict how the mass changes if we change properties of quarks or gluons. A brute-force lattice calculation is required. Weather is a similar example. We understand the basic rules, but weather patterns are only predictable with limited success and a lot of forward simulation.
hallgrim 5y ago
I agree. So far I have never heard any good arguments for why it should be more than an emergent property. Any aspect of consciousness that is usually brought up can either be attributed to some brain function, or the aspect is a wishy washy, hand-wavy property the emergence-skeptic can’t quite define. The insight from the study of the minds of brain-damaged people alone gives fascinating insight into the interplay of mechanical defects and their experiential effects.
ne0flex 5y ago
Last year, a good friend of my friend passed away. His death affected my friend deeply to the point that my friend was determined to find evidence of the continuance of consciousness after death and becoming extremely depressed. My friend believes that life is utterly meaningless if there is no consciousness after death, to the point where he's considering suicide because once he's dead he wouldn't know he committed suicide, and those around him will eventually die and not know that he committed suicide. Due to this, he doesn't want to accept that consciousness may just boil down to natural processes and is hoping that there is something more.
- mjrpes 5y ago
  It sounds like your friend is less worried about consciousness in general disappearing and more worried about his consciousness disappearing. Consciousness as thing can never completely go away. Even if the universe dies out, given enough time, even if the span of time seems infinite, a new hospitable universe will be born that contains conscious beings. If this wasn't true, how could we even exist right now?
  - ne0flex 5y ago
    Sure a new hospitable universe that contains conscious things may come into existence in the future but that doesn't your consciousness would come back with your memories. And the possibility of the consciousness of your loved ones existing alongside in the new universe seems slim.
imtringued 5y ago
You know I was thinking why humans do not distinguish between material possessions in an immaterial world (video games) and material possessions in a material world. Well, it turns out there is no difference. We value immaterial things because of the immaterial information we have about them. If I spend 3 months of salary on a shiny rock (diamonds) what makes the diamond special? It clearly isn't worth that much. There are substitutes and even artificial diamonds that are flawless that are superior to natural diamonds. It's only in combination with the information about the 3 months that the diamond ring becomes valuable and only to those who have the information and value the information. If I tell my wife that I spent 1 month even though I spent 3 months she will think I am cheap. If I divorce and marry again the new wife will not care about the old ring. There is no material world for us. We are just an information processing being and our body is just a puppet. If information processing is all we do then it should be clear that we can create consciousness through simulation and given the right structure it is not a matter of yes or no but rather a matter of degree.
Maursault 5y ago
I find your statement paradoxical and a Straw Man because it is reductionists (generally those with a strong and first training in hard science) that have a problem with mind being an emergent property while non-reductionists do not suggest that mind is beyond the laws of physics. I think you are arguing against Dualism while ignoring the entire modern field of Philosophy of Mind. Granted, most are not Philosophers of Mind and most are religious and therefore dualists... but they are not philosophers nor do they provide any supporting or dissenting arguments. And even the reductionists will say things like "I have a body," rather than what we should expect, "I am a body." There is more to Philosophy of Mind than dualists and non-dualists... such as Behavioralism, Functionalism, etc., there is a long list of perspectives.

by sampo 5y ago

tracedddd 5y ago

The implications are uncomfortable both existentially and ethically, so people will go to great lengths to search for evidence of the contrary.

mvcalder 5y ago
Or, most people’s subjective experience provides constant overwhelming evidence of the contrary.

snarfy 5y ago

As a software guy I think of it as trying to understand the execution of a complex web app by examining the machine instructions. At that level, how things happen is very apparent but why they do is pretty much lost.

Koshkin 5y ago
Except that the web app has not evolved naturally, i.e. by itself, from the machine instructions, like many emergent phenomena have.

hsn915 5y ago

Would it not surprised you if you learned that the program you wrote in C++ and compiled to machine code would produce "subjective" feelings in the CPU when executed?

avaer 5y ago
It wouldn't surprise me to learn that my CPU had feelings, if the CPU was created in a million year evolutionary process in which the lack of appropriate subjective feelings would have resulted in its death.
- hsn915 5y ago
  I'm talking about the current CPU. > if the CPU was created in a million year evolutionary process in which the lack of appropriate subjective feelings would have resulted in its death. You can say that about flying too. If the CPU was created in a billion year evolutionary process in which the lack of ability to flight would result in its death, the CPUs would fly. Like, how is this relevant? Can flight be properly explained in terms of signals flowing through a CPU? Yes or no?
foxhop 5y ago
Sure if it's badly written the CPU could get hot and all the side effects of running the code, maybe it's a virus. if the machine has consciousness of thought and not just continuity of data, it would feel pretty bad with it's sensors (maybe even some total pain threshold metric) and might even cry or complain to a near by sentient being for help. The problem is it may only speak to other beings of the same abstraction level, or higher and the listening being has to notice, have empathy, and the skillet to fix it.
mynegation 5y ago
Depends on definition of “feelings”. I can define a “feeling” of a CPU as its temperature, whether it is rising or going down, which does not sound too wild because CPU may react to it and decrease its frequency or shut off some cores. How about cache usage patterns that are literally coping mechanism with the necessity to access main memory?
morpheos137 5y ago
If the program was coded to produce subjective feeling, no. Otherwise, it would suprise me very much. I believe what we call consciousness is selected for and is written into the structure our brains have. I do not beleive that consciouness exists outside of living brains. Maybe I am wrong but so far there has not been much evidence. I also do not believe consciousness is simply an accident but that it was specifically selected for by evolution. People who have taken psychedelics may disagree but I think consciouness is tightly connected with sense of self, the ego. An organism that is conscious can have a sense of self. An organism with a sense of self may have a greater degree of flexible self preservation / flexible self promotion than a simple stimulus response network. Because we are conscious we focus on what we are feeling about our selves not just on the immediate sensory stimulus. Pyschedelics may break down the connection / integration of senses with self giving rise to the illusion of consciousness outside of the self-brain. But I would say this is an illusion.

vermilingua 5y ago

This solution isn’t ignored because it’s boring, but because it isn’t rigorous enough. If consciousness just is an emergent property of the function of neural cells, define function, define neural cells? What is the lowest level of complexity of each that allows consciousness? Why only neural cells, that is if it is only neural cells at all? By the anthropic principle it is a given that consciousness arises from the function of neural cells, but that isn’t a satisfying answer because it doesn’t actually answer anything.

skohan 5y ago
Idk I tend to think it is rigorous enough, and maybe the fact that we don't intuitively believe it's rigorous enough is an artifact of an evolved spiritual impulse. It seems to me consciousness is something we have to have to exist the way that we do. In order for the human animal to function, we need to understand the past, predict the future, understand the motivations of others and come up with stories about the world we use to convince others and facilitate collaboration. Human society wouldn't be possible without consciousness, and I don't see more explanation needed than the idea that we evolved this ability for our brains to talk to themselves in this certain way through the series of selective pressures which lead us to where we are today. Other animals probably have some version of this at varying levels of complexity, and somewhere along the line you could probably draw a line and say a slug with 15 neurons probably is more of a biological machine, and doesn't have anything you could describe as consciousness or subjective experience. Maybe you even need a pretty advanced brain with a neocortex to allow for subjective experience. I don't know why some "spooky stuff" is needed, or why some reach for consciousness to be a property which arises in individual cells. I think it's probably a very complex thing which arises from very complex structures consisting of millions or billions of neurons.
- maverick-iceman 5y ago
  There are various degrees of consciousness, awareness and abstraction capabilities between humans as well. The smarter the human, the more conscious and aware they are about the surroundings, the higher their ability to create and understand abstract concepts etc. Is this just the product of more numerous neurons? Better connected neurons? Higher density neurons in some areas of the brain? Is number of neurons correlated with IQ and in turn correlated to degree of consciousness and abstraction? We don't know yet, but it seems better advised to start looking at the base biological components first vs "spooky stuff"

francasso 5y ago

I don't find it that difficult, in fact yours is just as much of a belief as the one of the people you subtly criticize. You believe that the standard model and gravity (or whatever unknown theory that can have some experimental evidence to generalize both) are enough to model the behavior of human beings/animal as an "emergent" phenomena, even though there is no direct evidence for that. Even worse actually, there is no mathematical model.

eurasiantiger 5y ago
There are various models that could possibly be developed to accurately account for the emergent complexity we experience. Dimensionality of causal sets and Wolfram’s recent research into causal graphs come to mind.
roywiggins 5y ago
Emergent phenomena are often hard to predict, like the weather. That doesn't actually tell us a whole lot about the underlying physics, it seems to me. The halting problem is an emergent property of turing machines, and we know mathematically that the behavior of a Turing machine cannot usually be predicted or mathematically modeled without just running it. The mathematical underpinnings of superconductivity are still in flux, but there's still every reason to believe that it's an emergent phenomenon from known physics. I don't see any obvious reason why consciousness can't be something like that.
- francasso 5y ago
  I don't think either of those examples is in the same category as consciousness, or actually lets stick to "modeling of human and animal behavior", because I don't know what you mean by consciousness since we all have a feeling for what it is but there is no good precise definition, or framework in which you could give one. In both examples you made we do in fact have good mathematical descriptions that allow us to describe the system and the way it works, and moreover we can infer/predict non obvious things about it. Do you know of anything similar that can be applied to human/animal behavior?

dandanua 5y ago

This boring explanation is in the framework of classical physics. Quantum physics is very different. In QM, physical objects don't have definite states until observed. Any observation requires an observer. So, we have that states are relative to observers. But what is observer? It is our consciousness in the first place.

NavinF 5y ago
> But what is observer? It is our consciousness You fell for a ruse. Your phone can use its camera to observe quantum phenomena such as shot noise just fine. Observations have nothing to do with consciousness.
- dandanua 5y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Von_Neumann%E2%80%93Wigner_interpretation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Von_Neumann%E2%80%93Wigner_int...

dominicl 5y ago

Would love to discuss this over drinks. For me it's the opposite. It's feels pretty natural to me to imagine that intelligence and (perceived) free will are emergent properties. But consciousness troubles me, we still can't prove for anyone but ourselves that it does in fact exist - while it's existance is "apparent" to oneself. Also it does not make logical sense to me why such a feature should even develop, why have consciousness if you can have intelligence and problem solving without it? Loved the discussion between Lex Friedmann and Sam Harris on this very topic: https://youtu.be/4dC_nRYIDZU https://youtu.be/4dC_nRYIDZU

BoiledCabbage 5y ago
> Also it does not make logical sense to me why such a feature should even develop, why have consciousness if you can have intelligence and problem solving without it? Who/what says that you can? Consciousness seems to make most sense as a sliding scale than as a sudden switch. But even if you do argue that it's optional with intelligence, the reason it would be present would simply be: is the most efficient way to implement it.

roberttod 5y ago

At what point does it immerge? What is the smallest unit? Is it a magic number of neurons, or when they get arranged in a certain way? There's a mystery in these questions, and I think that's well accepted. I've heard this "emergent property" explanation before but it seems kind of a handwavey way of avoiding answering any questions. "It just appears when you have enough neurons" is probably true but how?!

Koshkin 5y ago
The "degree" of consciousness is certainly a function of the number of neurons functionally specialized for this particular purpose.
- denton-scratch 5y ago
  Is your "certainly" analogous to the way young folk today use the word "literally"?
  - Koshkin 5y ago
    As in "no doubt."
edanm 5y ago
> "It just appears when you have enough neurons" is probably true but how?! Then you don't disagree with parent. You're saying that we don't know enough to fully explain consciousness, which I think everyone would agree with. Parent is just saying that our not understanding it is not because there's something outside of the known laws of physics that we're missing - we just don't know to understand how the laws of physics give rise to consciousness, but they do.

binbag 5y ago

People don't accept it because it doesn't solve the problem. The problem is why an experience is had by someone, not why there is a mind.

smokel 5y ago

I agree that it is amazing that people keep believing in obsolete theories, but it may not be all bad. In some areas of life, and to some people, very old theories have more explaining power than modern day science has. And they are often more comforting. If neural networks explain consciousness (which they may or may not do), then there are still some remaining issues to explain. For example, how can it be that our universe exists, and why are the laws of physics in place? And why are they so consistent? The consciousness problem may be unrelated to these problems about the fundamentals of science. It may well be that we can understand consciousness as a thing that exists entirely inside the laws of physics, but some people are not yet convinced. It may even be the case that the consciousness problem and the fundamental science problems are intrinsically related. Hence the interest in the combination of quantum mechanics and consciousness. One hint that points in this direction is that neural networks are a great basis for abstraction and logic. And by some coincidence this is exactly what can be used to form theories that explain everything we observe.

jcims 5y ago

'Emergent phenomena' is the 'draw the rest of the damn owl' of this conversation. It's doing way too much work to be useful. It's like saying that life is an emergent phenomena from condensed energy.

Koshkin 5y ago
It is as good as any sensible hypothesis: it allows us to focus on a more promising direction of research.
- denton-scratch 5y ago
  A hypothesis is an unproved proposition that is actually susceptible to proof (or disproof). That is, it must make testable predictions. What predictions, testable in principle, are made by this "emergent phenomenon" hypothesis?
  - Koshkin 5y ago
    Well, philosophy is different from (positive) science in that regard. Yes, you have to realize that the notion of emergent phenomena belongs to philosophy, where a hypothesis (it can be said that philosophy consists of hypotheses) can only be "proven" indirectly, from relevant experience (such as scientific research).
hnedeotes 5y ago
It's more hand-wavy than it's admitted. When you think about it, the idea of emergent phenomena amounts to: - There's no underlying consciousness or conscious originator (no god, no panpsychism, no underlying conscious layer at the basis of reality, no nothing) - At some point, two or more elements (rocks, atoms, etc, that weren't conscious), aligned precisely in a given configuration and zap!, they became conscious and interactive - All consciousness then sprang from that. So the question would be, if systems favour inertia, stasis and conservation of energy, why would there be consciousness at all and just not an endless void, or a perfectly stable (as in homeostasis) system without conscious agents, or just rocks floating in the space. I'm not saying the idea of emergent phenomena is wrong, just that you better answer the complex questions other "supernatural" theories try to address, before declaring it some sort of obvious and correct answer.

alpaca128 5y ago

It's not difficult to accept that consciousness could be an emergent property, but it doesn't provide any insight. How do we get the abstraction layer of coherent thoughts from just a collection of neurons? We have no idea. Sure your explanation makes sense. But it's a bit like explaining the creation process of black holes with the words "they're an emergent property of gravity". It doesn't tell us anything, and if we want to understand it deeply we can't be satisfied with such a simple non-answer.

davrosthedalek 5y ago
I wouldn't call black holes "emergent". They do behave very similar to other gravitational objects -- just more "extreme". Another example are atoms: Most of their properties are easy to predict from the properties of their constituents and from the physical laws: The mass of atom is the sum of the mass of the constituents, minus the binding energy, which we can easily predict. But, for example, nucleon mass is emergent. Most of it is created dynamically by QCD, and we cannot easily predict it. We can, for example, not easily predict how the mass changes if we change properties of quarks or gluons. A brute-force lattice calculation is required. Weather is a similar example. We understand the basic rules, but weather patterns are only predictable with limited success and a lot of forward simulation.

hallgrim 5y ago

I agree. So far I have never heard any good arguments for why it should be more than an emergent property. Any aspect of consciousness that is usually brought up can either be attributed to some brain function, or the aspect is a wishy washy, hand-wavy property the emergence-skeptic can’t quite define. The insight from the study of the minds of brain-damaged people alone gives fascinating insight into the interplay of mechanical defects and their experiential effects.

ne0flex 5y ago

Last year, a good friend of my friend passed away. His death affected my friend deeply to the point that my friend was determined to find evidence of the continuance of consciousness after death and becoming extremely depressed. My friend believes that life is utterly meaningless if there is no consciousness after death, to the point where he's considering suicide because once he's dead he wouldn't know he committed suicide, and those around him will eventually die and not know that he committed suicide. Due to this, he doesn't want to accept that consciousness may just boil down to natural processes and is hoping that there is something more.

mjrpes 5y ago
It sounds like your friend is less worried about consciousness in general disappearing and more worried about his consciousness disappearing. Consciousness as thing can never completely go away. Even if the universe dies out, given enough time, even if the span of time seems infinite, a new hospitable universe will be born that contains conscious beings. If this wasn't true, how could we even exist right now?
- ne0flex 5y ago
  Sure a new hospitable universe that contains conscious things may come into existence in the future but that doesn't your consciousness would come back with your memories. And the possibility of the consciousness of your loved ones existing alongside in the new universe seems slim.

imtringued 5y ago

You know I was thinking why humans do not distinguish between material possessions in an immaterial world (video games) and material possessions in a material world. Well, it turns out there is no difference. We value immaterial things because of the immaterial information we have about them. If I spend 3 months of salary on a shiny rock (diamonds) what makes the diamond special? It clearly isn't worth that much. There are substitutes and even artificial diamonds that are flawless that are superior to natural diamonds. It's only in combination with the information about the 3 months that the diamond ring becomes valuable and only to those who have the information and value the information. If I tell my wife that I spent 1 month even though I spent 3 months she will think I am cheap. If I divorce and marry again the new wife will not care about the old ring. There is no material world for us. We are just an information processing being and our body is just a puppet. If information processing is all we do then it should be clear that we can create consciousness through simulation and given the right structure it is not a matter of yes or no but rather a matter of degree.

Maursault 5y ago

I find your statement paradoxical and a Straw Man because it is reductionists (generally those with a strong and first training in hard science) that have a problem with mind being an emergent property while non-reductionists do not suggest that mind is beyond the laws of physics. I think you are arguing against Dualism while ignoring the entire modern field of Philosophy of Mind. Granted, most are not Philosophers of Mind and most are religious and therefore dualists... but they are not philosophers nor do they provide any supporting or dissenting arguments. And even the reductionists will say things like "I have a body," rather than what we should expect, "I am a body." There is more to Philosophy of Mind than dualists and non-dualists... such as Behavioralism, Functionalism, etc., there is a long list of perspectives.