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Why can’t the world’s greatest minds solve the mystery of consciousness? (2015)
- gbjw 5y ago'Why can't consciousness solve the mystery of its own existence?'
- endiangroup 5y agoThis. You have the set of all sets problem... As soon as some part of you steps aside to inspect the other, it's missing out itself. In the words of Alan Watts: You can't touch the tip of your finger with the tip of the same finger, you can't bite your own teeth. It's an irreducible problem. Lest there is some social way we can achieve it...
- gpderetta 5y agoYou can touch someone else finger though. You could bite someone else teeth, but yech!
- endiangroup 5y agothats the interesting part! Can it be done as a team.
- dailyanchovy 5y agoThat sounds like false reasoning, take a computer for example. You can have a computer emulate itself perfectly (a finger touching itself by that analogy).
- endiangroup 5y agoThat's a subprocess and not the thing we started with (that's analogous to me imagining myself... its not the same self that is doing the imagining), the assumption here is consciousness is single threaded.
- fallingfrog 5y agoWhat mystery? This is the same kind of question as “how does aspirin find a toothache?” It’s based on a whole rat’s nest of false assumptions, and therefore cannot be answered.
- etiam 5y agoSeems to me that the bigger problem with the headline is the the a priori assertion that these are the World's Greatest Minds. But substituting for "Philosophy's Biggest Egos" really detracts from the mystique I guess :p
- Simon321 5y agoBecause it's badly defined and so it's unanswerable because what it means changes depending on who you ask.
- goatlover 5y agoIt's not badly defined. Consciousness is our subjective experience of color, sound, taste, smell, touch, feelings in perception, imagination, hallucination, illusion, dreams and inner dialog. It's something we're all familiar with. The modern philosophical term for this is qualia. Chalmers, Block, Nagel, etc. have discussed this at length. Even philosophers who disagree with them like Dennett and Keith Frankish do so by engaging with the definition above. It's unanswerable to date because there is no consensus on what the nature of subjectivity is. How are some brain states conscious? Is it a cognitive illusion? Is it weakly emergent? Is consciousness a property of everything or perhaps rich information streams? Is it functional or biological? Are we cognitively closed to the answer?
- gpderetta 5y agothe problem is "subjective experience". How do you define that? Otherwise that definition is at best incomplete. Being the subject of experience is not enough. A camera experience color, but almost everybody would agree it is not conscious.
- Jensson 5y agoEveryone who is conscious is 100% aware that they are conscious. That is the only definition you need. Of course we can't know if others are conscious, but that doesn't mean the definition isn't easy to make. The hard part is tying this definition to physical properties, not the definition itself.
- bryan0 5y ago> It's not badly defined. Consciousness is our subjective experience of color, sound, taste, smell, touch, feelings in perception, imagination, hallucination, illusion, dreams and inner dialog. It's something we're all familiar with. I don’t know this doesn’t seem like a great definition to me. It lists a dozen distinct properties, most very complicated in their own right, and then kind of collapses into “we all know what it is anyway”
- 323 5y ago[flagged]
- xamuel 5y agoI think part of the problem might be people too often try to come up with some grand unifying theory all at once, without standing on the shoulders of giants. Sort of like trying to write a gigantic codebase all in one sitting (no test suite, no syntax highlighting) and then sending it off for code review without even running it. This preprint my co-authors and I are working on might offer something of a babystep, not toward consciousness itself but toward the simpler problem of self-reflection, and more specifically of measuring self-reflection in reinforcement learning agents: https://philpapers.org/archive/ALEEET-3.pdf https://philpapers.org/archive/ALEEET-3.pdf
- White_Wolf 5y agoNot sure how to describe it but I see it like more of a approach and limitations or tech problem. 1- can't study it,in details, live with 0 risk of damage 2- can't test injecting data without risk of damage 3- the live data that we can extract/record (while monitoring input) with current tech is limited. I'm thinking that we're still at the stage comparable with using a multimeter to test a 8 layer pcb, with no schematics, while it's powered on. I, personally, think science will get there at some point, but we'll need some serious tech advancements to do that.
- xamuel 5y agoThat's one of the reasons it's so nice to use reinforcement learning agents as guinea pigs. I can "pip install" a bunch of industry-standard RL agents and put them through the most bizarre scenarios, scenarios it would never be possible to put a human through. No ethical issues involved, since these RL agents are nothing more than a bunch of matrix multiplications.
- White_Wolf 5y agoOff topic: For some reason, when I read "pip install" my mind drifted off to "apt-get install kung fu" and I started grinning like an idiot.
- Zigurd 5y agoIn theory, and this is a pretty airtight theory, it is computation. Because if it isn't, it's magic. In practice, it is only implemented in one type of animal, or maybe a few types, depending on how it is defined. And we do not have a practical answer for how and why. Partial at best. And not in a way that would enable enough understanding about what kind of computation it is to implement similar-enough computation in a machine. It feels like the scale of computation needed is now, or soon will be, available. The 100 billion neurons with 100 trillion connections seem daunting until you look at the connection and neuron (and sensory) data rates. It was clearly never going to happen in a Symbolics 3600. It is not clear it could not happen in a modern data center.
- brandonmenc 5y ago> it is computation OK, but what is "computation"? If you perform the computation with a lot of pencils and a lot of paper, is it conscious?
- bryan0 5y agoThis is basically the Chinese Room argument and the answer is: yes, the system as a whole is conscious.
- sramsay 5y agoThat's one answer. Another is that you would be within your rights to draw the inference that the system you are observing is conscious (which is slightly different, and deeply unsatisfying to many).
- bryan0 5y agoCan you explain the difference?
- sramsay 5y agoFor Turing, the criteria for intelligence was a matter of observers (if it walks like a duck . . .); what is "actually happening" inside is irrelevant. Searle's objection was that what is happening "inside" is surely not irrelevant. So while some answered that in the Chinese Room argument the "whole system is conscious," others argued that Turing's point still stands. Someone observing the system would have to conclude that the system was intelligent, regardless of what was happening inside. The two answers are roughly on the same side of the argument, but subtly different in important ways.
- ipnon 5y agoIf you increased the size of the brain 1,000 times it would be about the size of Madison Square Garden.[0] Now take any cubic meter of this mega-brain. There will be about 40,000 neurons in each. Good luck figuring out how these work in tandem by themselves. Now what about in tandem with the rest of our Madison Square Garden brain? Now shrink it back down and fit it in our heads again ... [0] https://waitbutwhy.com/2017/04/neuralink.html https://waitbutwhy.com/2017/04/neuralink.html
- gremloni 5y agoTo be honest those numbers seem like something we should be able to completely map. They’re high but not astronomical or anything.
- Jensson 5y agoMapping the synapses of a brain is useless without mapping the behaviour of the connections, they have already mapped flea brains etc but that didn't help them create a flea AI.
- simonh 5y agoWe can’t even accurately simulate the behaviour of a single neuron on a modern workstation in real time.
- firebaze 5y ago
- Kaibeezy 5y ago2015. What’s happened since?
- ncmncm 5y agoHot air before, hot air after.
- okareaman 5y agoI like the theory that consciousness is a 5th energy force after gravity, electromagnetism, strong/weak nuclear force that informs inanimate collection of atoms to become living and thoughts, ideas and feeling are packets of information on the conscious field. Our brains are like radio receivers tuning into this collective energy where common thoughts ideas and feelings exist (the collective unconscious Jung talks about.) Each of us has a unique collection of those thoughts and feelings existing as a conscious energy pattern that constitutes our personality.
- ChrisMarshallNY 5y agoI remember watching a fascinating show, in the 1990s, called “A Glorious Accident”[0] Dealt with exactly this. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Glorious_Accident https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Glorious_Accident
- beaconstudios 5y agoIt seems to me that the way to combine our very real experience of consciousness and monist philosophy is through a kind of cybernetic panpsychism, which is to say that "consciousness" is a range on a sliding scale that includes all feedback-driven processes. That's my angle anyway.
- stared 5y agoConsciousness (as in: a subjective EXPERIENCE) is IMHO in the same category as "why there is something rather than nothing?". That is, it falls back to the anthropic principle. If we didn't exist, we wouldn't even be able to consider this question. Or in other words: it is hard to formulate the opposite. I can be wrong, of course. For long decades scientists considered the hidden variable theory of quantum mechanics ("God does not play dice" - as summarised by Einstein) a philosophical challenge. John Bell was not able to publish his research as it was considered "not even physics". It was surprising that a seemingly philosophical challenge turned into a testable one.
- Trasmatta 5y agoThe anthropic principle might help explain the reason, but not the mechanics. You could use the anthropic principle to help explain why we live on a planet in the Goldilocks zone, but that doesn't mean there aren't laws of physics that explain why that's important for life. Likewise, we still might be able to explain the mechanics of consciousness.
- 1_player 5y agoSince everybody is sharing their pet theory, mine is that consciousness is a bug, a side effect of having a prefrontal cortex, long term memory and being able to "predict" the future. These tools have important needs for our survival, and come with the unintended effect of asking ourselves "who am I and what is my purpose?" Now it's too late for natural selection to select it out if not beneficial, for we have overridden and grown more powerful, at least in hubris, than Nature. There is no purpose for humanity. No grand design. We are just replicating lifeforms that have gone self aware. Accept it, it's particularly freeing.
- namanyayg 5y agoThat's what I personally feel too -- some few necessary components combine to give the illusion of self. I would add to this, though, the ability to perceive input from our senses and becoming an "observer", thus creating the separation of oneself from the universe: the self is who observes, everything else is the universe. This distinction of self from the universe is also talked about in Buddhism as being a massive flaw of human understanding. In reality, all of us are one with the universe and arise from it.
- Jensson 5y agoYou'd still need a new law of physics to explain that though. Ultimately every phenomena in the universe is explained by physics, so until consciousness is a part of physics we don't understand it.
- hdjjhhvvhga 5y agoI'd accept it, but it's illogical. There are just too many accidents needed to make this happen. Paradoxically, at the same time our minds are so limited they can accept only two possibilities: (1) everything was created by a god, (2) everything happened by accident. My pet peeve is that there is a third option, but our minds are unable to grasp it.
- Jensson 5y agoImagine if we could find a scientific explanation for consciousness, and that would lead to a ton of new discoveries. The world might become more sci-fi than we could ever dream of today. So it is sad to see so many view this question as impossible to solve, or just give out hand wavy explanations like "computation" etc, rather than try to think about what would actually be required to understand what consciousness is.
- Kafkish 5y agoBecause trying to understand consciousness with the mind is like trying to measure the circumference of the equator with a 12-inch ruler.
- d--b 5y agoIt looks like everyone on HN either has their own answer, or just ignore that there is a debate and decide that there is no mystery, or that consciousness cannot understand its own mechanism. So yeah, we definitely haven't cracked it...
- elemesmedve 5y agoI think we cannot know anything at all, in the sense of completely understanding and knowing the "essence" of something. All our knowledge is instrumental. We have pragmatic theories and that's all we'll ever have. The existence of a (physical) reality? A (very useful) theory. Existence of "things"? It's the pragmatic way our thinking works. Consciousness comes first, theories about "reality" come after. Expecting of "solving" the "mystery of consciousness" is futile. Existence is mystical and unknowable. Still, it's very useful to strive for understanding and explanations, we just have to accept our limitations.
- dkarl 5y ago> “Look, I’m not a zombie, and I pray that you’re not a zombie,” Chalmers said, one Sunday before Christmas, “but the point is that evolution could have produced zombies instead of conscious creatures – and it didn’t!” This statement surprised me. If evolution could have created zombies, and equally possibly could have not created zombies, then consciousness would be a weird and unexplained chance occurrence. Despite having evolution to explain how we came to exist as complex information-processing organism, we would need an additional and entirely different explanation for why we happen to be conscious. We get a more elegant situation if we suppose that consciousness is a necessary side effect of creatures like us. Which feels no less strange and magical, even if it is simpler, and took me straight to panpsychism, and the question of whether the machines we create might be conscious, and whether we are creating them to have pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral experiences. Equally, since we can see how machines are made of smaller machines and so on, we can wonder if parts of us have consciousness and whether it is the same consciousness as our own, or if a group of people has a consciousness that experiences our world in some way but is unable to make its presence known because it exists at a level unconnected from the consciousnesses that direct human speech and action. Or maybe it has an illusion of agency just like we do.
- bryan0 5y ago> We get a more elegant situation if we suppose that consciousness is a necessary side effect of creatures like us. Agreed. I never understood the zombie distinction. It seems ridiculous that some thinking machines are “zombies” and some are not.
- simonh 5y agoThe question there is what exactly, and very specifically do you mean by 'thinking'. We perform very complex intellectual tasks completely subconsciously all the time, without any concious awareness that we're doing them. Driving a car, while listening to the radio for example. Playing football or any complex sport at the highest level is done very largely on autopilot. Grandmasters playing chess, or Go, don't consciously think through every possible permutation of move, yet they can out play extremely sophisticated algorithms. Huge swathes of the cognitive load on these very sophisticated tasks is subconscious, so clearly those tasks must in principle be doable by entities not capable of consciousness. We don't yet know where the boundaries are between tasks that do and don't involve consciousness, if there are any.
- xojoc 5y agoOther threads: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8923008 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8923008 [2015-01-21] (89 comments) https://www.reddit.com/r/cogsci/comments/2t8ctb https://www.reddit.com/r/cogsci/comments/2t8ctb [2015-01-22] (182 comments) https://www.reddit.com/r/philosophy/comments/2t6mjz https://www.reddit.com/r/philosophy/comments/2t6mjz [2015-01-21] (663 comments) All discussions: https://discussions.xojoc.pw/q/https%3A//www.theguardian.com/science/2015/jan/21/-sp-why-cant-worlds-greatest-minds-solve-mystery-consciousness https://discussions.xojoc.pw/q/https%3A//www.theguardian.com... Discussions with similar title: https://discussions.xojoc.pw/q/Why%20can%E2%80%99t%20the%20world%E2%80%99s%20greatest%20minds%20solve%20the%20mystery%20of%20consciousness%3F%20%282015%29 https://discussions.xojoc.pw/q/Why%20can%E2%80%99t%20the%20w... Archive: https://archive.md/newest/https://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/jan/21/-sp-why-cant-worlds-greatest-minds-solve-mystery-consciousness https://archive.md/newest/https://www.theguardian.com/scienc...
- morninglight 5y agoWhat test can we apply to determine if something has consciousness? Without a definition and test, we are just blowing smoke up our nether regions. There is a similarity to using the Turing test to detect intelligence. At the present, this is just another such useless rabbit hole.
- fjfaase 5y agoIt looks like the article only references philosophers and psychologists, not people like, for example, Thomas Metzinger, Stanislas Dehaene and Joscha Bach.
- a9h74j 5y agoA recent comment on HN led me to Metzinger's The Ego Tunnel. IMO that book alone would get a lot of people past neuroscience-uninformed Philosophy 101 takes on philosophy-of-mind.
- Pamar 5y agoI suppose it's a style choice from the author. I found the article in the "you might also like..." section at the end of https://www.theguardian.com/news/2021/apr/27/the-clockwork-universe-is-free-will-an-illusion https://www.theguardian.com/news/2021/apr/27/the-clockwork-u... and the issue was mostly framed in terms of philosophy/ethics.
- simonh 5y agoI'm very impressed by some of the advances in neuroscience over the last 10 years or so. It seemed like the field was stalled for a long time since the 80s but some new technology and clever experimental techniques have got progress moving again. I wouldn't be surprised if we hit another sticky patch, I suspect it's going to be a long road to solving this problem, but it's exciting to have new ideas and demonstrations to think about.
- foxyv 5y agoThe problem with solving the mystery of consciousness is that we don't even really have a definition of it that makes sense. Until then, the answer will inevitably be 42.
- perceptronas 5y agoBible definition is quite interesting. AFAIU it defines consciousness as an ability to discern between good and evil
- Jensson 5y agoSo humans aren't conscious?
- hdjjhhvvhga 5y agoI think you confuse consciousness with conscience. Apart from that, the Bible contains almost no definitions (and this has caused many problems in the past, even people killing each other as they disagreed on what certain things mean). If one wants precise definitions, they can be found in literature such as Abhidharmakosha.
- goatlover 5y agoQualia.
- Trasmatta 5y agoYep, but then the problem becomes defining what qualia actually is, and why it exists.
- davidivadavid 5y agoHow are qualia necessary/sufficient for consciousness? Seems more related to the subjectivity of perception, which in itself doesn't require consciousness (or does it?)?
- goatlover 5y ago