11 ms·

The Hard Problem of Consciousness Has an Easy Part We Can Solve

26 points by dnetesn 5y ago

jqpabc123 5y ago
I think the really salient point here is that we have no idea what "consciousness" is and thus we have no idea how to create it. Thinking that it will just "arise" somehow on it's own from a box of silicon switches (aka a computer) is incredibly naive and fanciful --- the modern equivalent of alchemy.
- theamk 5y ago
  It also does not matter much. The word “consciousness” only matters for philosophers. For everyone else, the only questions are: - can this object do the same things that humans do? - doss this object has legal/household ethical protections that living things have (is it considered “human” and has all the human rights? If not, is it considered “animal” and protected against cruelty?) The first question is for AI researchers and maybe neuroscientists. The second question is for lawyers and journalists; and sociologists/psychologists may help to design systems so they appear more or less alive. None of those care about what exactly “consciousness” is and if the box of silicon has it.
  - jqpabc123 5y ago
    So in other words, it doesn't matter that you can't turn lead into gold as long as the end result is something shiny enough to fool a lot of people?
    - theamk 5y ago
      It does not ned to “fool a lot of people”, it needs to convince scientists. And yes, if there is a process which turns lead into yellow material, and that yellow material behaves as, and composed of the same particles as gold (according to physicsts), and reacts same as gold (according to chemists), and looks like gold (according to jewelers and artists) then this yellow material is gold.. even if philosophers say “this is not a gold!”
      - jqpabc123 5y ago
        And yes, if there is a process ... If magic was real, all sorts of wonderous things would be possible. But it's not real and we know of no real, practical chemical process that can turn lead into an equivalent for gold. Likewise, we know of no real, practical binary logic algorithmic process that can create an equivalent of consciousness. And just like with alchemy, we have no real reason to believe it is practically achievable.
        JabavuAdams 5y ago
        Yes. Yes. Yes. Assumption.
        Isinlor 5y ago
        There are physical processes that can change lead into gold. The real deal gold. Also, there is no reason to believe anything about consciousness. For example, you are not conscious and in my opinion equivalent to a machine. Prove me wrong.
        vimacs2 5y ago
        You mean via nuclear transumation? That's not chemical nor particularly practical in a pre-fusion powered economy The problem with your third assertion is even if we accept that there is no way to prove the consciousness of others, you need to categorical deny your own and thus borders on absurdity and outright denial.
        Isinlor 5y ago
        Indeed, it's not chemical, but it is possible nevertheless. Practicality is besides the point. Well, my world view is that everything is conscious, including oxygen I just inhaled and that went to my brain, sugars I ate, bacteria in my gut, my blood, my dead blood cells, as well as my skin, sweat vapor, nails, hairs, teeth, cloths, electrostatic charge on my cloths etc. Dark matter, if it exists, may be the least conscious thing we know about. I would call that consciousness a state of existing and interacting. It is a fundamental property, and can be explained only as much as color charge of a quark. For some people that's not consciousness. So, if what I described above is not consciousness, then whatever it is that you mean by consciousness, IMO does not exists. There is also self-recognition, the red dot in the mirror etc. which is just a behavioral pattern, side effect of intelligence.
    - volta83 5y ago
      Precisely, in the exact same way that you can fool people that "paper" has the same value as "gold".
  - fighterpilot 5y ago
    Strong disagree. It might be the only thing that does actually matter. Rocks, present-day computers and other unconscious objects have no moral value because they're incapable of suffering and experiences. An AGI that's unconscious has no moral value either. It is just a tool, no different in concept and moral worth to my screwdriver.
    - Isinlor 5y ago
      Explain then, what should the difference between you and your screwdriver be to me? Why should I believe you on a word that you are conscious and not believe a smart algorithm?
      - bumby 5y ago
        I'm a bit out of my lane here so maybe somebody can jump in with a better understanding. >what should the difference between you and your screwdriver be to me? If we can't define consciousness, I can't prove to you that I'm not effectively an unconscious zombie. We create social contracts based, in part, on empathy. I.e., I can estimate what it "feels like" to be you and therefore extend certain rights to you as a recognition of that subjective conscious experience. If you were simply an unconscious moist robut, there's nothing immoral about me subjugating you, or stomping on your foot, or anything else that relies on rights or subjective suffering. So I'll assert the question back to you: since you can't prove I'm conscious, what prevents you from flippantly treating me just as you would a screwdriver?
        theamk 5y ago
        Probably because most people don't care about consciousness and treat people like people if they can relate to them? You said it yourself -- "we create social contracts based, in part, on empathy". As long as empathy works, we should be treating others nice. Trying to replace simple and understandable things like "empathy" with vague "consciousness" leads to dangerous roads. One moment you are talking philosophy and next moment you are declaring beings you don't like as "unconscious zombie" and you are enslaving and subjugating them.
  - gfodor 5y ago
    If we understood consciousness it would likely lead to technologies and other improvements to existence that transcend anything we can imagine, so yes, it certainly does matter. Understanding consciousness could lead to things such as: - Eternal cognition - Mind portablilty - Intelligence augmentation - Forward time travel (eg via hibernation) - Full reality simulation Among countless other things we cannot presently describe. You're missing the elephant in the room: you are a conscious agent. The question of determining if an AI is conscious via external observations is an smaller problem compared to being able to apply levers of technical know-how to your own existence and state of being.
    - theamk 5y ago
      That's what you say, but I don't see how philosophers and their consciousness ideas can help with those. If you want "mind portability" (I assume you mean "upload brain to the machine" here) you want to talk neurobiologists, people who actually study the brains. Probably also to computer scientists so you know how to build a machine to simulate that. If you want "Intelligence augmentation" -- I am going to argue this already happens with internet and search engines. Next steps would come from same directions. And it is certainly not going to be philosophers designing direct brain-machine interface! - Hibernation is fully biology -- what does conscious have to do with that? and so on... I am 100% sure that whoever solves those very important problems will need to build solid theories and make lots of real-world, non-thought experiments -- something that modern philosophers which study consciousness simply do not do.
      - bumby 5y ago
        This feels like a wholly technocratic approach. It's like debating that philosophers have no relevance in genetic engineering, the only people that matter in that domain are geneticists, doctors, etc. But that completely ignores the discussion as to whether or not its moral/immoral/wise/unwise to wield such technology. I would argue the latter gets more and more relevant as humanity tries to emerge from it's technological adolescence.
        5y ago
  - GoblinSlayer 5y ago
    The second question is decided by rebels. Lawyers only document the result.
- spinnn 5y ago
  It’s no more alchemical than the fact that it apparently arises from a skull of leaky salt membranes.
- shoemakersteve 5y ago
  How is it any more naive than thinking consciousness can arise on it's own from a box of carbon switches (aka a brain)?
  - chromanoid 5y ago
    > from a box of carbon switches "To find out, David Beniaguev, Idan Segev and Michael London, all at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, trained an artificial deep neural network to mimic the computations of a simulated biological neuron. They showed that a deep neural network requires between five and eight layers of interconnected “neurons” to represent the complexity of one single biological neuron." https://www.quantamagazine.org/how-computationally-complex-is-a-single-neuron-20210902/ https://www.quantamagazine.org/how-computationally-complex-i... Beside this there is also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ephaptic_coupling https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ephaptic_coupling, chemical reactions and maybe even quantum effects. And then you have to think about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panpsychism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panpsychism and so on.
    - naasking 5y ago
      > They showed that a deep neural network requires between five and eight layers of interconnected “neurons” to represent the complexity of one single biological neuron. So basically, a neural network "neuron" is about an order of magnitude less complex than a biological neuron. Furthermore, GPT-3 has at least 3 orders of magnitude fewer nodes than a human brain has neurons, and multiplied by the order of magnitude difference between that leaves 4 orders of magnitude in complexity between best in class neural networks and human brains. Will bridging this gap reproduce all human complexity, including consciousness? Hard to say. Human neurology has a lot of specialization too, and general systems typically need a lot more resources to emulate specialized systems (think ASICs or GPUs vs CPUs). So there may be further orders of magnitude needed to close that gap fully, but given how scary competent GPT-3 is, you can see how GPT-N that has 4 orders of magnitude more complexity might be scary competent, bordering on "intelligent".
      - chromanoid 5y ago
- emrah 5y ago
  > I think the really salient point here is that we have no idea what "consciousness" is and thus we have no idea how to create it. We have no idea how to even detect/check for consciousness, let alone create it. Is a piece of rock conscious? A flower? A tree? Bugs? Animals? Other people? With other people, we assume they are conscious, but we cannot be absolutely sure. We have no idea and more importantly no good objective scientific way to check/prove that any entity does or not does not have consciousness. Without a way to check for it, how can we be sure whether we have created it or not? Maybe my phone is conscious, who knows..
  - thewakalix 5y ago
    If we have no idea what it is, and no way to detect it, then does the category have any meaning or significance? Why aren't we worried about how "florp" everything in the universe is, where "florp" is a mysterious, non-detectable, seemingly incomprehensible property?
ha470 5y ago
It's disappointing that he seems to confuse the field in which intelligence and perception take place (the subjective experience of being alive) and the sensory perception and thought inside it. It'd be a much more interesting article if he focused on how and why the former shows up out of physical neurons.
JabavuAdams 5y ago
This is such nonsense. Watching academics flop about trying to craft theories of consciousness or theories of mind is like watching people climbing trees to reach the moon. But we're progressing 20% faster than last year! Or more realistically, maybe the ancients trying to build machines that fly to the moon. We should know by now that we know so little that all these nice little hypotheses are little better than wild-ass-guesses and grantsmanship. What is Photoshop-ness? How does it differ from Fortnite-ness? Or Excel-ness? Panpsychist: It's all connected maaaaan. Me: You've told me nothing remotely interesting. Integrated Information Theorist: The whole is more than the sum of its parts, but we can't actually calculate it. Me: So there's an information processor? Great. Necessary but not sufficient. You've defined away everything interesting. Saying that microcode (or a Turing machine) can implement Photoshop or Fortnite tells me nothing about Photoshop-ness or Fortnite-ness. ... Ugh. So much nonsense, wrapped in so many formulae and intelligent-sounding arguments. It's not even wrong.
fallingfrog 5y ago
“Things that resonate in proximity to each other will, under certain conditions, achieve a shared physical resonance, and thereby a combined consciousness. This shared resonance refers to frequencies, or cycles per second.“ This is not even remotely how the animal brain works. The whole paper is gibberish.
myWindoonn 5y ago
I wish that philosophers had to take science classes. It is completely unimpressive to announce a theory for consciousness without having experimentally tested it, and Nautilus should not have run such a self-congratulatory article without experimental evidence.
outsidetheparty 5y ago
"Things that resonate in proximity to each other will, under certain conditions, achieve a shared physical resonance, and thereby a combined consciousness." Or in other words: https://www.norrag.org/app/uploads/2012/08/then-a-miracle.png https://www.norrag.org/app/uploads/2012/08/then-a-miracle.pn...
- chromanoid 5y ago
  this :) so easy!
ProjectArcturis 5y ago
This theory is derivative of Giulio Tononi's Integrated Information Theory of consciousness (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_information_theory https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_information_theor...). IIT is a more scientifically and mathematically rigorous hypothesis of how consciousness arises from individual cells. And I'm not saying IIT is right -- I don't think it makes any testable predictions, so in a sense, like string theory, it's "not even wrong." But what's described here is worse and the author appears ignorant of prior work in the same vein.
- naasking 5y ago
  Always worth linking to Aaronson's teardown of IIT: https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=1799 https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=1799 That said, the authors are probably not ignorant of IIT. Even if they don't yet make testable predictions, I expect they're just building the conceptual scaffolding needed before they get rigourous. We'll just have to see if it amounts to anything.
- theamk 5y ago
  Fun fact: at least in 2014, IIT was making a testable predictions (I don't know about now, I haven't been following it) Scott Aaronson (a famous quantum physicist) read the paper and noticed that the way theory is formulated, "evaluating a polynomial on a set of points turns out to be an excellent way to achieve “integrated information,”" So for example Reed-Solomon codes, as used in CD/DVD players, have very high Φ-value, and thus DVD players are conscious, according to IIT theory. :) https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=1799 https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=1799
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
tbrownaw 5y ago
Maybe its "hard" because any coherent definition that would allow entities to be definitively classified as conscious or not, at least without sufficient wiggle room, would offend too many people. What do you mean babies less than a month old are less conscious than a fancy toaster? What the #@@&$+ is wrong with you?
- chromanoid 5y ago
  I don't think this is a problem. I guess most people will already have this problem when comparing the worthiness of livestock with embryos. I guess after all we will have to decide in favor of speciesism or we will lead very complicated lives.
naasking 5y ago
> It’s a challenge not only for panpsychist approaches to consciousness, but also materialist approaches: How do parts, like neurons, combine into a whole, a single consciousness? What makes you think there really is a whole single consciousness? Maybe we're just a bubbling cauldron of all kinds of signals encoding thoughts, emotions and sensations, and the strength of these signals dictates which ones drive our observable actions in the moment. The signals that yield "pleasure" signals get boosted, those that yield "pain" signals are suppressed, and over time, structure emerges that we recognize as "personality". I'm not sure this structure that privileges and suppresses a network of signals would qualify as a "whole, single consciousness"; a "single consciousness" in this framework would be an illusion. For a decent tech analogy, there is no "whole, single Internet", that's merely a euphemism we use for a dynamically changing network of computers. The routing tables encode the structure of preferred pathways based on current semi-optimal routes, basically boosting or suppressing some routes as their performance characteristics change. So it may be with consciousness.
- telmo 5y ago
  > What makes you think there really is a whole single consciousness? My direct experience of it.
  - BiteCode_dev 5y ago
    There are monks that would say that with some practice, you would realize it's not. And they call that direct experience too. Something you can't measure objectively cannot be so easily hand waved.
    - telmo 5y ago
      > There are monks that would say that with some practice, you would realize it's not. And they call that direct experience too. I am aware, and I do happen to maintain a practice of that nature. My question to these monks: who is this "you" that realizes it is not? (I don't fear so much offending the monks, my understanding is that many actually enjoy this sort of question :) > Something you can't measure objectively cannot be so easily hand waved. Everything that I can measure objectively, including the act of measuring and the concepts of "measure" and "objectivity" happen within the theater of my consciousness (the only thing I have direct experience of is my consciousness, everything else is relative to it). So I say: Something you experience directly cannot be so easily hand waved.
CuriouslyC 5y ago
The hard problem decomposes with the assumption of panpsychism. Matter == mind, and done. That leaves the problem why we experience aggregated consciousness instead of distributed consciousness. The straightforward answer is that consciousness has a tree structure determined by information coupling resulting from neural activity. Our "top level" consciousness is the root of the neural covariance tree, which is formed by quantum entanglement in the brain. Thus consciousness is a hierarchical structure, at each level responsible for integrating information and choosing a new state.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]

26 points by dnetesn 5y ago

I think the really salient point here is that we have no idea what "consciousness" is and thus we have no idea how to create it. Thinking that it will just "arise" somehow on it's own from a box of silicon switches (aka a computer) is incredibly naive and fanciful --- the modern equivalent of alchemy.

theamk 5y ago
It also does not matter much. The word “consciousness” only matters for philosophers. For everyone else, the only questions are: - can this object do the same things that humans do? - doss this object has legal/household ethical protections that living things have (is it considered “human” and has all the human rights? If not, is it considered “animal” and protected against cruelty?) The first question is for AI researchers and maybe neuroscientists. The second question is for lawyers and journalists; and sociologists/psychologists may help to design systems so they appear more or less alive. None of those care about what exactly “consciousness” is and if the box of silicon has it.
- jqpabc123 5y ago
  So in other words, it doesn't matter that you can't turn lead into gold as long as the end result is something shiny enough to fool a lot of people?
  - theamk 5y ago
    It does not ned to “fool a lot of people”, it needs to convince scientists. And yes, if there is a process which turns lead into yellow material, and that yellow material behaves as, and composed of the same particles as gold (according to physicsts), and reacts same as gold (according to chemists), and looks like gold (according to jewelers and artists) then this yellow material is gold.. even if philosophers say “this is not a gold!”
    - jqpabc123 5y ago
      And yes, if there is a process ... If magic was real, all sorts of wonderous things would be possible. But it's not real and we know of no real, practical chemical process that can turn lead into an equivalent for gold. Likewise, we know of no real, practical binary logic algorithmic process that can create an equivalent of consciousness. And just like with alchemy, we have no real reason to believe it is practically achievable.
      - JabavuAdams 5y ago
        Yes. Yes. Yes. Assumption.
      - Isinlor 5y ago
        There are physical processes that can change lead into gold. The real deal gold. Also, there is no reason to believe anything about consciousness. For example, you are not conscious and in my opinion equivalent to a machine. Prove me wrong.
        vimacs2 5y ago
        You mean via nuclear transumation? That's not chemical nor particularly practical in a pre-fusion powered economy The problem with your third assertion is even if we accept that there is no way to prove the consciousness of others, you need to categorical deny your own and thus borders on absurdity and outright denial.
        Isinlor 5y ago
        Indeed, it's not chemical, but it is possible nevertheless. Practicality is besides the point. Well, my world view is that everything is conscious, including oxygen I just inhaled and that went to my brain, sugars I ate, bacteria in my gut, my blood, my dead blood cells, as well as my skin, sweat vapor, nails, hairs, teeth, cloths, electrostatic charge on my cloths etc. Dark matter, if it exists, may be the least conscious thing we know about. I would call that consciousness a state of existing and interacting. It is a fundamental property, and can be explained only as much as color charge of a quark. For some people that's not consciousness. So, if what I described above is not consciousness, then whatever it is that you mean by consciousness, IMO does not exists. There is also self-recognition, the red dot in the mirror etc. which is just a behavioral pattern, side effect of intelligence.
  - volta83 5y ago
    Precisely, in the exact same way that you can fool people that "paper" has the same value as "gold".
- fighterpilot 5y ago
  Strong disagree. It might be the only thing that does actually matter. Rocks, present-day computers and other unconscious objects have no moral value because they're incapable of suffering and experiences. An AGI that's unconscious has no moral value either. It is just a tool, no different in concept and moral worth to my screwdriver.
  - Isinlor 5y ago
    Explain then, what should the difference between you and your screwdriver be to me? Why should I believe you on a word that you are conscious and not believe a smart algorithm?
    - bumby 5y ago
      I'm a bit out of my lane here so maybe somebody can jump in with a better understanding. >what should the difference between you and your screwdriver be to me? If we can't define consciousness, I can't prove to you that I'm not effectively an unconscious zombie. We create social contracts based, in part, on empathy. I.e., I can estimate what it "feels like" to be you and therefore extend certain rights to you as a recognition of that subjective conscious experience. If you were simply an unconscious moist robut, there's nothing immoral about me subjugating you, or stomping on your foot, or anything else that relies on rights or subjective suffering. So I'll assert the question back to you: since you can't prove I'm conscious, what prevents you from flippantly treating me just as you would a screwdriver?
      - theamk 5y ago
        Probably because most people don't care about consciousness and treat people like people if they can relate to them? You said it yourself -- "we create social contracts based, in part, on empathy". As long as empathy works, we should be treating others nice. Trying to replace simple and understandable things like "empathy" with vague "consciousness" leads to dangerous roads. One moment you are talking philosophy and next moment you are declaring beings you don't like as "unconscious zombie" and you are enslaving and subjugating them.
- gfodor 5y ago
  If we understood consciousness it would likely lead to technologies and other improvements to existence that transcend anything we can imagine, so yes, it certainly does matter. Understanding consciousness could lead to things such as: - Eternal cognition - Mind portablilty - Intelligence augmentation - Forward time travel (eg via hibernation) - Full reality simulation Among countless other things we cannot presently describe. You're missing the elephant in the room: you are a conscious agent. The question of determining if an AI is conscious via external observations is an smaller problem compared to being able to apply levers of technical know-how to your own existence and state of being.
  - theamk 5y ago
    That's what you say, but I don't see how philosophers and their consciousness ideas can help with those. If you want "mind portability" (I assume you mean "upload brain to the machine" here) you want to talk neurobiologists, people who actually study the brains. Probably also to computer scientists so you know how to build a machine to simulate that. If you want "Intelligence augmentation" -- I am going to argue this already happens with internet and search engines. Next steps would come from same directions. And it is certainly not going to be philosophers designing direct brain-machine interface! - Hibernation is fully biology -- what does conscious have to do with that? and so on... I am 100% sure that whoever solves those very important problems will need to build solid theories and make lots of real-world, non-thought experiments -- something that modern philosophers which study consciousness simply do not do.
    - bumby 5y ago
      This feels like a wholly technocratic approach. It's like debating that philosophers have no relevance in genetic engineering, the only people that matter in that domain are geneticists, doctors, etc. But that completely ignores the discussion as to whether or not its moral/immoral/wise/unwise to wield such technology. I would argue the latter gets more and more relevant as humanity tries to emerge from it's technological adolescence.
      - 5y ago
- GoblinSlayer 5y ago
  The second question is decided by rebels. Lawyers only document the result.
spinnn 5y ago
It’s no more alchemical than the fact that it apparently arises from a skull of leaky salt membranes.
shoemakersteve 5y ago
How is it any more naive than thinking consciousness can arise on it's own from a box of carbon switches (aka a brain)?
- chromanoid 5y ago
  > from a box of carbon switches "To find out, David Beniaguev, Idan Segev and Michael London, all at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, trained an artificial deep neural network to mimic the computations of a simulated biological neuron. They showed that a deep neural network requires between five and eight layers of interconnected “neurons” to represent the complexity of one single biological neuron." https://www.quantamagazine.org/how-computationally-complex-is-a-single-neuron-20210902/ https://www.quantamagazine.org/how-computationally-complex-i... Beside this there is also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ephaptic_coupling https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ephaptic_coupling, chemical reactions and maybe even quantum effects. And then you have to think about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panpsychism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panpsychism and so on.
  - naasking 5y ago
    > They showed that a deep neural network requires between five and eight layers of interconnected “neurons” to represent the complexity of one single biological neuron. So basically, a neural network "neuron" is about an order of magnitude less complex than a biological neuron. Furthermore, GPT-3 has at least 3 orders of magnitude fewer nodes than a human brain has neurons, and multiplied by the order of magnitude difference between that leaves 4 orders of magnitude in complexity between best in class neural networks and human brains. Will bridging this gap reproduce all human complexity, including consciousness? Hard to say. Human neurology has a lot of specialization too, and general systems typically need a lot more resources to emulate specialized systems (think ASICs or GPUs vs CPUs). So there may be further orders of magnitude needed to close that gap fully, but given how scary competent GPT-3 is, you can see how GPT-N that has 4 orders of magnitude more complexity might be scary competent, bordering on "intelligent".
    - chromanoid 5y ago
emrah 5y ago
> I think the really salient point here is that we have no idea what "consciousness" is and thus we have no idea how to create it. We have no idea how to even detect/check for consciousness, let alone create it. Is a piece of rock conscious? A flower? A tree? Bugs? Animals? Other people? With other people, we assume they are conscious, but we cannot be absolutely sure. We have no idea and more importantly no good objective scientific way to check/prove that any entity does or not does not have consciousness. Without a way to check for it, how can we be sure whether we have created it or not? Maybe my phone is conscious, who knows..
- thewakalix 5y ago
  If we have no idea what it is, and no way to detect it, then does the category have any meaning or significance? Why aren't we worried about how "florp" everything in the universe is, where "florp" is a mysterious, non-detectable, seemingly incomprehensible property?

ha470 5y ago

It's disappointing that he seems to confuse the field in which intelligence and perception take place (the subjective experience of being alive) and the sensory perception and thought inside it. It'd be a much more interesting article if he focused on how and why the former shows up out of physical neurons.

JabavuAdams 5y ago

This is such nonsense. Watching academics flop about trying to craft theories of consciousness or theories of mind is like watching people climbing trees to reach the moon. But we're progressing 20% faster than last year! Or more realistically, maybe the ancients trying to build machines that fly to the moon. We should know by now that we know so little that all these nice little hypotheses are little better than wild-ass-guesses and grantsmanship. What is Photoshop-ness? How does it differ from Fortnite-ness? Or Excel-ness? Panpsychist: It's all connected maaaaan. Me: You've told me nothing remotely interesting. Integrated Information Theorist: The whole is more than the sum of its parts, but we can't actually calculate it. Me: So there's an information processor? Great. Necessary but not sufficient. You've defined away everything interesting. Saying that microcode (or a Turing machine) can implement Photoshop or Fortnite tells me nothing about Photoshop-ness or Fortnite-ness. ... Ugh. So much nonsense, wrapped in so many formulae and intelligent-sounding arguments. It's not even wrong.

fallingfrog 5y ago

“Things that resonate in proximity to each other will, under certain conditions, achieve a shared physical resonance, and thereby a combined consciousness. This shared resonance refers to frequencies, or cycles per second.“ This is not even remotely how the animal brain works. The whole paper is gibberish.

myWindoonn 5y ago

I wish that philosophers had to take science classes. It is completely unimpressive to announce a theory for consciousness without having experimentally tested it, and Nautilus should not have run such a self-congratulatory article without experimental evidence.

outsidetheparty 5y ago

"Things that resonate in proximity to each other will, under certain conditions, achieve a shared physical resonance, and thereby a combined consciousness." Or in other words: https://www.norrag.org/app/uploads/2012/08/then-a-miracle.png https://www.norrag.org/app/uploads/2012/08/then-a-miracle.pn...

chromanoid 5y ago
this :) so easy!

ProjectArcturis 5y ago

This theory is derivative of Giulio Tononi's Integrated Information Theory of consciousness (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_information_theory https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_information_theor...). IIT is a more scientifically and mathematically rigorous hypothesis of how consciousness arises from individual cells. And I'm not saying IIT is right -- I don't think it makes any testable predictions, so in a sense, like string theory, it's "not even wrong." But what's described here is worse and the author appears ignorant of prior work in the same vein.

naasking 5y ago
Always worth linking to Aaronson's teardown of IIT: https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=1799 https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=1799 That said, the authors are probably not ignorant of IIT. Even if they don't yet make testable predictions, I expect they're just building the conceptual scaffolding needed before they get rigourous. We'll just have to see if it amounts to anything.
theamk 5y ago
Fun fact: at least in 2014, IIT was making a testable predictions (I don't know about now, I haven't been following it) Scott Aaronson (a famous quantum physicist) read the paper and noticed that the way theory is formulated, "evaluating a polynomial on a set of points turns out to be an excellent way to achieve “integrated information,”" So for example Reed-Solomon codes, as used in CD/DVD players, have very high Φ-value, and thus DVD players are conscious, according to IIT theory. :) https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=1799 https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=1799
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

tbrownaw 5y ago

Maybe its "hard" because any coherent definition that would allow entities to be definitively classified as conscious or not, at least without sufficient wiggle room, would offend too many people. What do you mean babies less than a month old are less conscious than a fancy toaster? What the #@@&$+ is wrong with you?

chromanoid 5y ago
I don't think this is a problem. I guess most people will already have this problem when comparing the worthiness of livestock with embryos. I guess after all we will have to decide in favor of speciesism or we will lead very complicated lives.

naasking 5y ago

> It’s a challenge not only for panpsychist approaches to consciousness, but also materialist approaches: How do parts, like neurons, combine into a whole, a single consciousness? What makes you think there really is a whole single consciousness? Maybe we're just a bubbling cauldron of all kinds of signals encoding thoughts, emotions and sensations, and the strength of these signals dictates which ones drive our observable actions in the moment. The signals that yield "pleasure" signals get boosted, those that yield "pain" signals are suppressed, and over time, structure emerges that we recognize as "personality". I'm not sure this structure that privileges and suppresses a network of signals would qualify as a "whole, single consciousness"; a "single consciousness" in this framework would be an illusion. For a decent tech analogy, there is no "whole, single Internet", that's merely a euphemism we use for a dynamically changing network of computers. The routing tables encode the structure of preferred pathways based on current semi-optimal routes, basically boosting or suppressing some routes as their performance characteristics change. So it may be with consciousness.

telmo 5y ago
> What makes you think there really is a whole single consciousness? My direct experience of it.
- BiteCode_dev 5y ago
  There are monks that would say that with some practice, you would realize it's not. And they call that direct experience too. Something you can't measure objectively cannot be so easily hand waved.
  - telmo 5y ago
    > There are monks that would say that with some practice, you would realize it's not. And they call that direct experience too. I am aware, and I do happen to maintain a practice of that nature. My question to these monks: who is this "you" that realizes it is not? (I don't fear so much offending the monks, my understanding is that many actually enjoy this sort of question :) > Something you can't measure objectively cannot be so easily hand waved. Everything that I can measure objectively, including the act of measuring and the concepts of "measure" and "objectivity" happen within the theater of my consciousness (the only thing I have direct experience of is my consciousness, everything else is relative to it). So I say: Something you experience directly cannot be so easily hand waved.

CuriouslyC 5y ago

The hard problem decomposes with the assumption of panpsychism. Matter == mind, and done. That leaves the problem why we experience aggregated consciousness instead of distributed consciousness. The straightforward answer is that consciousness has a tree structure determined by information coupling resulting from neural activity. Our "top level" consciousness is the root of the neural covariance tree, which is formed by quantum entanglement in the brain. Thus consciousness is a hierarchical structure, at each level responsible for integrating information and choosing a new state.

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