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Thanks for the link. I agree with Seth that consciousness is much like a controlled hallucination - after all, we don't experience reality directly, but through

by xweber 5y ago

Thanks for the link. I agree with Seth that consciousness is much like a controlled hallucination - after all, we don't experience reality directly, but through the predictions of our brain. But then the question is, why do you need this hallucination? I suspect that consciousness evolved because it makes an organism more capable than one who doesn't. But what does consciousness offer over just taking in sensory input and making predictions without having qualia (much like a computer does)?

wruza 5y ago
Is it the fact that a computer doesn’t have one of a sort?
FeepingCreature 5y ago
I think the important part is that you can represent more things in consciousness than just "five-sense data", ie. exotic sense data like emotions, reactions, imagination, memory, impulses, selfhood, and correlate them with the ordinary sensory data. A non-conscious animal may see a predator and get scared, but I don't know if it knows that it's scared because of the predator. I think you need an integrated space for both direct data and metadata for that. Also, in humans, I'd presume that consciousness, being introspectable, relates to our ability to understand our own interests and behaviors, and those of others, in symbolic terms and express them with language. It's how we close the circle between thinking and "I think". (I agree with the article that people vastly overestimate the mystery of consciousness.) PS: I think consciousness being introspectable is very underrated. We can perceive memories of perception, we can feel nostalgic for having felt a certain way in the past, and we can realize and name that we are doing this. The "reentrancy" of consciousness is a core aspect of our cognitive and strategic flexibility.
- tremon 5y ago
  A non-conscious animal may see a predator and get scared This is maybe just a matter of definition, but I find it highly unlikely that that scenario exists. "Seeing" a predator already requires so much higher-level processing (not just the visual cues, but the analysis and classification) that I find it unlikely the animal does not have a working distinction between intra-body and outside-world sensations. The problem with defining "consciousness" is that we do not have reliable inter-species communication to compare notes between species, so our definition of consciousness itself is hampered by the ability to communicate that sense of consciousness to each other. Already in your post, there's seven different interpretations of what "consciousness" could actually mean: - ability to recall past experiences ("emotions", "memory") - awareness of the self ("impulses", "selfhood") - ability to conceive experiences that do not correspond with sensory inputs ("imagination") - meta-awareness of instinctual reactions ("if it knows that it's scared because of the predator") - introspection ("our ability to understand our own interests and behaviors") - empathy ("and those of others") - communicating our sense of self to others ("express them with language") Personally, I think we should assume that all animal species possess the first four, all large mammals can do the first five, and many species have the ability to do the sixth (it's been proven in dogs, apes, parrots, crows, and dolphins -- and probably others).
  - mrkramer 5y ago
    All the things you mentioned are products of evolution invented for the purpose of increasing survival rate. For example emotions serve us mammals to bond with each other, bring us closer together so that we help each other in order to survive.
Sosh101 5y ago
The hallucination analogy is useful I think in some ways, in that it could allow access to a view of reality that has important parts represented in a meaningful way. But, surely a hallucination requires an underlying consciousness to experience it? So for me it's not very useful in explaining the phenonmenon of consciousness itself. It seems that it's not far removed from the old "theatre" analogy, which requires an unexplained "homunculus" (and probably homunculi ad infinitum).
Aardwolf 5y ago
Explanations like "consciousness is a controlled hallucination" or "consciousness is just an illusion" don't answer anything for me. To be able to have a hallucination or an illusion, you still need the consciousness experiencing that. Explain that consciousness. > I suspect that consciousness evolved because it makes an organism more capable than one who doesn't. You can't prove consciousness from behavior (afaik), and it's behavior that makes organisms more capable
- grumbel 5y ago
  > "consciousness is just an illusion" Replace "illusion" with "perception" and it will make a lot more sense. Consciousness does obviously exist in one form or another, but when people think intuitively about consciousness they imagine it as an actor. A little guy in your head that looks at the world and makes decisions. That's the illusion. That "little guy", that "self", isn't the one doing the work, your brain is the one doing the work. The little guy is a how the brain tries to make sens of itself. Just like photons hitting your eyeballs might be interpreted as cats and dogs out there in the world, the brain interprets or perceives whatever it is doing internally as a "self". > You can't prove consciousness from behavior (afaik) Without some sens of self any creature would have a pretty difficult time surviving, as it wouldn't be able to tell itself apart from the rest of the world.
  - Aardwolf 5y ago
    > The little guy is a how the brain tries to make sens of itself. That still doesn't explain consciousness itself. Though I think there are many different interpretations and definitions for the word consciousness so we might be talking about a different one. > Without some sens of self any creature would have a pretty difficult time surviving, as it wouldn't be able to tell itself apart from the rest of the world. A cell just replicates because that's what the molecules in it happen to do
    - grumbel 5y ago
      > That still doesn't explain consciousness itself. Well, which part doesn't it explain? It's pretty conclusive as far as I am concerned. As among other things, you can explain why philosophers would even ask that question in the first place. > A cell just replicates because that's what the molecules in it happen to do And transistors just go on and off, yet people still spend years studying computer science. The existence of simple mechanism at one level doesn't prevent higher order mechanism at another, quite the opposite. Those cells aren't going to do much replicating when you get killed by a tiger, some awareness of yourself and the environment helps prevent that.
ikrenji 5y ago
maybe consciousness is a side effect, an emergent phenomena. once the brain gets complicated enough it will just arise (on a scale)... also are our decisions ours? or some inner layer in us creates the decision and then we just consciously observe it / let it play out...
- watercooler_guy 5y ago
  >maybe consciousness is a side effect, an emergent phenomena. once the brain gets complicated enough it will just arise (on a scale) This is my feeling too. Since the brain is just physical matter arranged a certain way, doing a certain type of processing, I really think it possible that some computer programs we use today are also doing the right kind of processing to grant them a simple subjective inner experience. Of course most programs don’t have a way to tell us if that’s the case, except maybe GPT-3 :) > are our decisions ours? or some inner layer in us creates the decision and then we just consciously observe it / let it play out I have evidence for it being the latter: our higher brain functions let us rationalize, to ourselves, the decisions that were deterministically made by our subconscious, so it feels like “you” made the decisions “because you wanted to”. People who have the connection between their brain hemispheres severed can unconsciously reach a decision in one hemisphere, but then consciously rationalize it in the other hemisphere, without having experienced the making of the decision [0]: >In one example of this kind of test, a picture of a chicken claw was flashed to the left hemisphere and a picture of a snow scene to the right hemisphere. Of the array of pictures placed in front of the subject, the obviously correct association is a chicken for the chicken claw and a shovel for the snow scene. Patient P.S. responded by choosing the shovel with the left hand and the chicken with the right. When asked why he chose these items, his left hemisphere replied `Oh, that's simple. The chicken claw goes with the chicken, and you need a shovel to clean out the chicken shed'. Here the left brain, observing the left hand's response, interprets that response in a context consistent with its sphere of knowledge—one that does not include information about the left hemifield snow scene. [0] https://academic.oup.com/brain/article/123/7/1293/380106 https://academic.oup.com/brain/article/123/7/1293/380106
raducu 5y ago
We obviously don't have the full picture about sensations -- they might be a side effect of specialized (biochemical) neural architectures, but more likely there is something intrinsic to them that grants advantages to sensations. There's something to making things really "personal" to an individual system having sensations that make it act in its best interest. Sensations are also very flexible biochemical abstractions and solutions to problems across aeons. It would have been quite hard for organisms to evolve without such abstractions -- like a worm recoiling in pain and a human quickly rettacting his burnt hand or avoiding certain kinds of people who have hurt him before.
tgv 5y ago
> we don't experience reality directly That muddies the water, IMO. We do experience reality directly: our nerve endings do. The next step is processing, which is somewhat mediated by low-level expectations. This takes place at sub-conscious levels. Conscious perception comes much later, and is obviously more filtered. To call it a hallucination is word play.
- pwm 5y ago
  > We do experience reality directly: our nerve endings do. Depending on how you define "reality" we only experience a tiny subset of it. We can only see/hear/touch/smell/taste a very restricted universe, only what our "antennas" can detect. In fact I would argue that we experience close to 0% of all of reality. On top of this extremely restricted input our processing of it is imperfect which means some of what we experience has nothing to do with reality.
  - tgv 5y ago
    Restricted as it may be, we experience reality. Experiencing reality completely is impossible anyway. And in the context of hallucination, what we can't experience doesn't matter.
    - pwm 5y ago
      Sure, I don't disagree but (to me anyway) it's important to point out the difference between reality vs. our potential intake from it. The blind men and the elephant parable applies.
- ThrustVectoring 5y ago
  There are fixed patterns in still images that appear to move when we perceive them. "We don't experience reality directly" and calling it a hallucination seems apt - the thing we experience when we look at things is less "what's actually there" and more "the best guess our brain can construct about what's there". Additional examples of this include the non-perception of the visual blind spot, how the brain fills in details in the middle of saccades, and how task-specific training causes perceptual differences (eg, thrown baseballs look bigger to professional batters).
noiv 5y ago
I think the most simple explanation is the brain runs a simulation of its environment and at some point after birth it puts its human into this simulation. That's probably when children start using the word 'I' and raise a consciousness.
davidhs 5y ago
I think what you mean by reality is physical reality, if so then it is impossible for us to directly experience it. You are a simulated being in a simulated world. The simulated world runs on a physical brain. Everything you experience is "hallucinations," but if your physical brain works normally then they will be constrained to explain the input to the brain. Consciousness is most likely a property or set of properties of this simulation. Some part of your brain make predictive models of its input, and the things that it models is yourself, your current environment, other stuff going on (the mind), how these things relate to each other and such. My guess is that qualia is something like primitives to this simulated world.
50 5y ago
Had this thought recently: The function of psychedelics is not to induce hallucinations, but to help you recognize that you’re always already hallucinating.

by xweber 5y ago

wruza 5y ago

Is it the fact that a computer doesn’t have one of a sort?

FeepingCreature 5y ago

I think the important part is that you can represent more things in consciousness than just "five-sense data", ie. exotic sense data like emotions, reactions, imagination, memory, impulses, selfhood, and correlate them with the ordinary sensory data. A non-conscious animal may see a predator and get scared, but I don't know if it knows that it's scared because of the predator. I think you need an integrated space for both direct data and metadata for that. Also, in humans, I'd presume that consciousness, being introspectable, relates to our ability to understand our own interests and behaviors, and those of others, in symbolic terms and express them with language. It's how we close the circle between thinking and "I think". (I agree with the article that people vastly overestimate the mystery of consciousness.) PS: I think consciousness being introspectable is very underrated. We can perceive memories of perception, we can feel nostalgic for having felt a certain way in the past, and we can realize and name that we are doing this. The "reentrancy" of consciousness is a core aspect of our cognitive and strategic flexibility.

tremon 5y ago
A non-conscious animal may see a predator and get scared This is maybe just a matter of definition, but I find it highly unlikely that that scenario exists. "Seeing" a predator already requires so much higher-level processing (not just the visual cues, but the analysis and classification) that I find it unlikely the animal does not have a working distinction between intra-body and outside-world sensations. The problem with defining "consciousness" is that we do not have reliable inter-species communication to compare notes between species, so our definition of consciousness itself is hampered by the ability to communicate that sense of consciousness to each other. Already in your post, there's seven different interpretations of what "consciousness" could actually mean: - ability to recall past experiences ("emotions", "memory") - awareness of the self ("impulses", "selfhood") - ability to conceive experiences that do not correspond with sensory inputs ("imagination") - meta-awareness of instinctual reactions ("if it knows that it's scared because of the predator") - introspection ("our ability to understand our own interests and behaviors") - empathy ("and those of others") - communicating our sense of self to others ("express them with language") Personally, I think we should assume that all animal species possess the first four, all large mammals can do the first five, and many species have the ability to do the sixth (it's been proven in dogs, apes, parrots, crows, and dolphins -- and probably others).
- mrkramer 5y ago
  All the things you mentioned are products of evolution invented for the purpose of increasing survival rate. For example emotions serve us mammals to bond with each other, bring us closer together so that we help each other in order to survive.

Sosh101 5y ago

The hallucination analogy is useful I think in some ways, in that it could allow access to a view of reality that has important parts represented in a meaningful way. But, surely a hallucination requires an underlying consciousness to experience it? So for me it's not very useful in explaining the phenonmenon of consciousness itself. It seems that it's not far removed from the old "theatre" analogy, which requires an unexplained "homunculus" (and probably homunculi ad infinitum).

Aardwolf 5y ago

Explanations like "consciousness is a controlled hallucination" or "consciousness is just an illusion" don't answer anything for me. To be able to have a hallucination or an illusion, you still need the consciousness experiencing that. Explain that consciousness. > I suspect that consciousness evolved because it makes an organism more capable than one who doesn't. You can't prove consciousness from behavior (afaik), and it's behavior that makes organisms more capable

grumbel 5y ago
> "consciousness is just an illusion" Replace "illusion" with "perception" and it will make a lot more sense. Consciousness does obviously exist in one form or another, but when people think intuitively about consciousness they imagine it as an actor. A little guy in your head that looks at the world and makes decisions. That's the illusion. That "little guy", that "self", isn't the one doing the work, your brain is the one doing the work. The little guy is a how the brain tries to make sens of itself. Just like photons hitting your eyeballs might be interpreted as cats and dogs out there in the world, the brain interprets or perceives whatever it is doing internally as a "self". > You can't prove consciousness from behavior (afaik) Without some sens of self any creature would have a pretty difficult time surviving, as it wouldn't be able to tell itself apart from the rest of the world.
- Aardwolf 5y ago
  > The little guy is a how the brain tries to make sens of itself. That still doesn't explain consciousness itself. Though I think there are many different interpretations and definitions for the word consciousness so we might be talking about a different one. > Without some sens of self any creature would have a pretty difficult time surviving, as it wouldn't be able to tell itself apart from the rest of the world. A cell just replicates because that's what the molecules in it happen to do
  - grumbel 5y ago
    > That still doesn't explain consciousness itself. Well, which part doesn't it explain? It's pretty conclusive as far as I am concerned. As among other things, you can explain why philosophers would even ask that question in the first place. > A cell just replicates because that's what the molecules in it happen to do And transistors just go on and off, yet people still spend years studying computer science. The existence of simple mechanism at one level doesn't prevent higher order mechanism at another, quite the opposite. Those cells aren't going to do much replicating when you get killed by a tiger, some awareness of yourself and the environment helps prevent that.

ikrenji 5y ago

maybe consciousness is a side effect, an emergent phenomena. once the brain gets complicated enough it will just arise (on a scale)... also are our decisions ours? or some inner layer in us creates the decision and then we just consciously observe it / let it play out...

watercooler_guy 5y ago
>maybe consciousness is a side effect, an emergent phenomena. once the brain gets complicated enough it will just arise (on a scale) This is my feeling too. Since the brain is just physical matter arranged a certain way, doing a certain type of processing, I really think it possible that some computer programs we use today are also doing the right kind of processing to grant them a simple subjective inner experience. Of course most programs don’t have a way to tell us if that’s the case, except maybe GPT-3 :) > are our decisions ours? or some inner layer in us creates the decision and then we just consciously observe it / let it play out I have evidence for it being the latter: our higher brain functions let us rationalize, to ourselves, the decisions that were deterministically made by our subconscious, so it feels like “you” made the decisions “because you wanted to”. People who have the connection between their brain hemispheres severed can unconsciously reach a decision in one hemisphere, but then consciously rationalize it in the other hemisphere, without having experienced the making of the decision [0]: >In one example of this kind of test, a picture of a chicken claw was flashed to the left hemisphere and a picture of a snow scene to the right hemisphere. Of the array of pictures placed in front of the subject, the obviously correct association is a chicken for the chicken claw and a shovel for the snow scene. Patient P.S. responded by choosing the shovel with the left hand and the chicken with the right. When asked why he chose these items, his left hemisphere replied `Oh, that's simple. The chicken claw goes with the chicken, and you need a shovel to clean out the chicken shed'. Here the left brain, observing the left hand's response, interprets that response in a context consistent with its sphere of knowledge—one that does not include information about the left hemifield snow scene. [0] https://academic.oup.com/brain/article/123/7/1293/380106 https://academic.oup.com/brain/article/123/7/1293/380106

raducu 5y ago

We obviously don't have the full picture about sensations -- they might be a side effect of specialized (biochemical) neural architectures, but more likely there is something intrinsic to them that grants advantages to sensations. There's something to making things really "personal" to an individual system having sensations that make it act in its best interest. Sensations are also very flexible biochemical abstractions and solutions to problems across aeons. It would have been quite hard for organisms to evolve without such abstractions -- like a worm recoiling in pain and a human quickly rettacting his burnt hand or avoiding certain kinds of people who have hurt him before.

tgv 5y ago

> we don't experience reality directly That muddies the water, IMO. We do experience reality directly: our nerve endings do. The next step is processing, which is somewhat mediated by low-level expectations. This takes place at sub-conscious levels. Conscious perception comes much later, and is obviously more filtered. To call it a hallucination is word play.

pwm 5y ago
> We do experience reality directly: our nerve endings do. Depending on how you define "reality" we only experience a tiny subset of it. We can only see/hear/touch/smell/taste a very restricted universe, only what our "antennas" can detect. In fact I would argue that we experience close to 0% of all of reality. On top of this extremely restricted input our processing of it is imperfect which means some of what we experience has nothing to do with reality.
- tgv 5y ago
  Restricted as it may be, we experience reality. Experiencing reality completely is impossible anyway. And in the context of hallucination, what we can't experience doesn't matter.
  - pwm 5y ago
    Sure, I don't disagree but (to me anyway) it's important to point out the difference between reality vs. our potential intake from it. The blind men and the elephant parable applies.
ThrustVectoring 5y ago
There are fixed patterns in still images that appear to move when we perceive them. "We don't experience reality directly" and calling it a hallucination seems apt - the thing we experience when we look at things is less "what's actually there" and more "the best guess our brain can construct about what's there". Additional examples of this include the non-perception of the visual blind spot, how the brain fills in details in the middle of saccades, and how task-specific training causes perceptual differences (eg, thrown baseballs look bigger to professional batters).

noiv 5y ago

I think the most simple explanation is the brain runs a simulation of its environment and at some point after birth it puts its human into this simulation. That's probably when children start using the word 'I' and raise a consciousness.

davidhs 5y ago

I think what you mean by reality is physical reality, if so then it is impossible for us to directly experience it. You are a simulated being in a simulated world. The simulated world runs on a physical brain. Everything you experience is "hallucinations," but if your physical brain works normally then they will be constrained to explain the input to the brain. Consciousness is most likely a property or set of properties of this simulation. Some part of your brain make predictive models of its input, and the things that it models is yourself, your current environment, other stuff going on (the mind), how these things relate to each other and such. My guess is that qualia is something like primitives to this simulated world.

50 5y ago

Had this thought recently: The function of psychedelics is not to induce hallucinations, but to help you recognize that you’re always already hallucinating.