5 ms·

What if consciousness is not an emergent property of the brain?

31 points by Anon84 4y ago

polishdude20 4y ago
What if consciousness is actually never clearly defined?
- blamestross 4y ago
  What if consciousness, like intelligence is not only not clearly defined, but actively retreats as science advances upon it's supposed definition. Consciousness isn't magic, it's metacognition. It's thinking about thinking. You have a finite (and not allways constant) amount of layers of recursion to your metacognition and you can hack symbolic representation to get nigh infinite recursion for very specific cases. Other animals (and likely some computational processes) have a nonzero amount consciousness. It's unlikely we will be able to quantize it anytime soon. Artificial Consciousness isn't a thing because consciousness only makes for less efficient machine slave labor, it's the quality of humans we are making computers to actively avoid dealing with. Why, other than unwisely funded hubris and ego, would anybody try to make it?
  - blamestross 4y ago
    Go read Blindsight, dispair, then realize consciousness is a decent intelligence bootstrapping mechanism that is likely convergent and common in the universe. Then wonder how quickly it will become vestigial, or if it already has.
    - wudangmonk 4y ago
      I enjoyed the book but why add vampires to something that is supposed to be hard scifi that in theory aims to have some sort of scientific accuracy.
  - carrolldunham 4y ago
    >It's thinking about thinking. Half of people talking about consciousness are not talking about that at all. They would call that self-consciousness or reflective consciousness. That is about what someone is experiencing. What many people are talking about is why someone (a material object) is experiencing anything at all.
    - blamestross 4y ago
      I've noticed that. They really are talking about literally the opposite of what I posit consciousness to be. I'd love to convince them to find a different word but I'm not convinced I shouldn't be the one to ceede the term and find another.
    - MattPalmer1086 4y ago
      Yes, this complete lack of agreement on terms is possibly the hardest problem in discussing it ;) I tend to use consciousness as the same as awareness really. Being awake and experiencing. This is where qualia are found, and is something I readily ascribe to most if not all animals, and even possibly other living things. I find the term self consciousness meaning meta cognition to be problematic, as many animals are aware of themselves as beings (e.g. recognise that a reflection is them). I don't think they can reflect on that much though. We support much higher levels of abstraction in thinking than other animals, and we can reflect on our own thoughts, including our self in that model. These are cognitive skills rather than being about awareness. I would say that an artificial intelligence can possess deep cognitive skills but have no awareness at all. Although it could have that too - I just don't see that as a requirement.
- red75prime 4y ago
  Clear definition is the end goal, not a starting point.
  - polishdude20 4y ago
    How do we know there is a "thing" to define?
    - stolen_biscuit 4y ago
      cause we're living it
      - layer8 4y ago
        Not everyone agrees with that.
- tshaddox 4y ago
  Indeed it isn't, or at least not in a way other than "that thing which I am beginning this discussion by declaring to exist undeniably." Which isn't a very good way to begin any rational inquiry.
dqpb 4y ago
> For example, there are well-documented experiences of people perceiving information from distant locations, the future, and mental impressions from other people without the use of rationale or traditional means (Cardeña, 2018).
- Blammar 4y ago
  Hey, I can make random accurate guesses too! I just don't tell you about my failures...
  - NateEag 4y ago
    I don't know what the author is referring to, but in NDE research, you can find plenty of claimed witnesses to incidents where someone awoke and promptly made a claim about reality that proved to be correct and which they had no clear way to have observed naturally. The most common one is probably knowing someone else has recently died, due to encountering the newly-dead in the apparent afterlife part of their NDE. Could that still suffer from the same selection bias problem? Sure. Do we have rigorous proof that this really happens as such? No, just various eyewitness testimonies saying that it did, and eyewitness testimony is famously unreliable. Still - if people really do come back from near-death and spontaneously report other deaths accurately without first checking for whether their perception was correct... that's kind of weird. Bruce Greyson apparently published a paper about the phenomenon, IIRC saying that they didn't find any instances of someone reporting a death incorrectly out of hundreds of reports of NDE-inspired death-knowledge claims. I've been meaning to dig that one up and look more closely at it, because that's at the very least pretty remarkable selection bias. Not sure I'm remembering the details right, though.
    - thechao 4y ago
      > you can find plenty of claimed witnesses to incidents where someone awoke and promptly made a claim about reality that proved to be correct and which they had no clear way to have observed naturally This is literally unbelievable. If what you're saying is true, it would be published in something like "Nature" or "Science". Please point to that paper. If it's not published in a journal of that prestige level, then it's certainly factually wrong.
trrbb 4y ago
astrange 4y ago
This is similar to "we're all just a simulation" - sure, maybe consciousness isn't in our brain and it's actually all in another dimension. But then how's it work over in the other dimension? It's gotta eventually actually be somewhere.
- Animats 4y ago
  That rabbit hole leads to a line of thinking. From the article: "Federico Faggin starts with the assumption that reality emerges from the free-will communications of a vast number of conscious entities". If we're living in a simulation, either it's insanely inefficient, uselessly simulating subatomic activity for hundreds of light years around. Or only stuff being looked at by some active entity is being simulated. Lots of games work that way. Most of the world is turned off most of the time. When two active entities previously running in unsynchronized simulations get close enough that their simulations have to sync, there can be artifacts as they sync up. Those should be noticeable. Some of the larger virtual world systems actually have that problem. But this is all probably bogus. There's a lot of wishful "consciousness must be special so that humans are important" in this line of thinking. As I point out occasionally, the place where AI does badly is not around "consciousness", whatever that is. It's around common sense and manipulation in unstructured situations. Or, as I like to put it, not screwing up in the next 30 seconds. Recently someone commented on here that octopi have those abilities. They're good at figuring out their environment, learn from others of their own kind, and are good at escaping. They're at least at dog level. Octopi are interesting because they are a separate evolution from mammals, with a much more distributed brain and a completely different vision system. This tells us there's more than one way to do it.
  - nullish_signal 4y ago
    >If we're living in a simulation, either it's insanely inefficient, uselessly simulating subatomic activity for hundreds of light years around. OK, how much RAM and Energy did your PC consume to send this text, versus the 10 Chrome tab Virtual Machines, 20 svchost processes, Windows Defender scanning for malware.... How many predictive branch instructions does your CPU errantly run, and discard, every hour? How many of your thoughts contribute positively to the external or internal environment? How many in-fighting cells and viruses in yoir body contribute to you as a Person? And yet, what effort would it take to re-design Everything to completely avoid Parasitic Events? If the Greys spin up Universes and Conscious Agents to stab at un-solvable problem, I'd wager they need those Systems to be Realistic, not Efficient
jacknews 4y ago
"phenomena where consciousness appears to extend beyond the physical brain and body in both space and time." I think 'appears' is the important caveat, IMHO.
- srcreigh 4y ago
  It is the crux. There’s a latent belief that all reality can be measured objectively in controlled environments. There’s reasons why this cannot be true both inside and outside the scientific realm. For one, scientific progress couldn’t exist without a perpetually large area of measurements which have not been made or imagined yet; science is not useful unless there is value in the “hunch” - subjectively interesting but not (yet) objectively measurable phenomenon - something which has not been measured. Secondly, there’s the undeniable possibility that some aspects of reality simply can never be measured scientifically for some reason. The question then is, how else can that knowledge be obtained? To not adore appearances is to be both unscientific and un-beyond-scientific.
fsh 4y ago
Is this some sophisticated parody, or are the authors serious about this complete nonsense?
xyzzy4747 4y ago
I bet that robots will take over the world and wipe out all forms of life before consciousness is ever figured out.
- tshaddox 4y ago
  "But they don't really know what it's like to experience the smell of freshly baked cookie!..." chant the last stronghold of humans in unison as the AI army completes its annihilation of humanity.
thamer 4y ago
All four authors are listed as being part of the "Institute of Noetic Sciences", which researches topic such as paranormal phenomena, psychic abilities, telekinesis, and other pseudoscientific topics in the realm of alternative medicine. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institute_of_Noetic_Sciences https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institute_of_Noetic_Sciences
- t-writescode 4y ago
  Given the question they’re asking, wouldn’t it exactly be that sort of thing? I’m not sure what the argument about their historical stances is intended to do, except that it reflects consistency in their thinking. If consciousness is not emergent of brain matter, the hop to non-physical is very short.
- eth0up 4y ago
  >pseudoscientific It's difficult for me to view Edgar Mitchell as some lucky pseudoscientific vagabond who by luck happened to hitch a ride to the moon and return with a buch of dumb ideas. A minor adjustment to your chosen terminology could exalt at least one of the listed pseudo topics into an actual scientific one by replacing "psychic abilities" with PSI. From my experience, those with the most hostile sentiment for that particular subject have the least awareness of it beyond the standard James Randy, ie spoon bender stuff. Admittedly, telekinesis is tempting to berate, but not so much with telepathy. It's a stretch, perhaps trite to say, but hand-washing was not long ago considered alternative medicine.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
maroonblazer 4y ago
Odd that they don't mention Graziano's conceptual framework for consciousness[0]. It seems one of the most comprehensive theories that I've come across, although I'm only an interested layperson. [0]https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2116933119 https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2116933119
inphovore 4y ago
Consciousness is the inflection of our existential being. Our brains are quantum computers (without qubits, it is quantum holography.) The illusion of singular consciousness in our minds is the product of so many individual neurons entangling and coupling. It is existential reality which is consciousness (the universe peering back upon itself.) Our brains and bodies are merely the jellybags which keep the electrochemical animation stable, as well as providing sensors and actuators for interacting with our environments. Intelligence is the mitigation of uncertainty. If it doesn’t mitigate uncertainty it isn’t intelligence. Consciousness is not intelligent. Consciousness co-opts intelligence as a tool for survival, and intelligence co-opts consciousness as a memetic host.
satisfice 4y ago
The article accomplished its purpose with me. I started by scoffing at non-physicalism, but by the end I agreed that there is a basis not to scoff— which is all the authors claim to want. They are trying to create a little space for humility about alternative theoretical constructs. They are NOT trying to debunk physicalism.
amriksohata 4y ago
IN hinduism, the mind, ego and body are all separate things.
grantcas 4y ago
[dead]

31 points by Anon84 4y ago

polishdude20 4y ago

What if consciousness is actually never clearly defined?

blamestross 4y ago
What if consciousness, like intelligence is not only not clearly defined, but actively retreats as science advances upon it's supposed definition. Consciousness isn't magic, it's metacognition. It's thinking about thinking. You have a finite (and not allways constant) amount of layers of recursion to your metacognition and you can hack symbolic representation to get nigh infinite recursion for very specific cases. Other animals (and likely some computational processes) have a nonzero amount consciousness. It's unlikely we will be able to quantize it anytime soon. Artificial Consciousness isn't a thing because consciousness only makes for less efficient machine slave labor, it's the quality of humans we are making computers to actively avoid dealing with. Why, other than unwisely funded hubris and ego, would anybody try to make it?
- blamestross 4y ago
  Go read Blindsight, dispair, then realize consciousness is a decent intelligence bootstrapping mechanism that is likely convergent and common in the universe. Then wonder how quickly it will become vestigial, or if it already has.
  - wudangmonk 4y ago
    I enjoyed the book but why add vampires to something that is supposed to be hard scifi that in theory aims to have some sort of scientific accuracy.
- carrolldunham 4y ago
  >It's thinking about thinking. Half of people talking about consciousness are not talking about that at all. They would call that self-consciousness or reflective consciousness. That is about what someone is experiencing. What many people are talking about is why someone (a material object) is experiencing anything at all.
  - blamestross 4y ago
    I've noticed that. They really are talking about literally the opposite of what I posit consciousness to be. I'd love to convince them to find a different word but I'm not convinced I shouldn't be the one to ceede the term and find another.
  - MattPalmer1086 4y ago
    Yes, this complete lack of agreement on terms is possibly the hardest problem in discussing it ;) I tend to use consciousness as the same as awareness really. Being awake and experiencing. This is where qualia are found, and is something I readily ascribe to most if not all animals, and even possibly other living things. I find the term self consciousness meaning meta cognition to be problematic, as many animals are aware of themselves as beings (e.g. recognise that a reflection is them). I don't think they can reflect on that much though. We support much higher levels of abstraction in thinking than other animals, and we can reflect on our own thoughts, including our self in that model. These are cognitive skills rather than being about awareness. I would say that an artificial intelligence can possess deep cognitive skills but have no awareness at all. Although it could have that too - I just don't see that as a requirement.
red75prime 4y ago
Clear definition is the end goal, not a starting point.
- polishdude20 4y ago
  How do we know there is a "thing" to define?
  - stolen_biscuit 4y ago
    cause we're living it
    - layer8 4y ago
      Not everyone agrees with that.
tshaddox 4y ago
Indeed it isn't, or at least not in a way other than "that thing which I am beginning this discussion by declaring to exist undeniably." Which isn't a very good way to begin any rational inquiry.

dqpb 4y ago

> For example, there are well-documented experiences of people perceiving information from distant locations, the future, and mental impressions from other people without the use of rationale or traditional means (Cardeña, 2018).

Blammar 4y ago
Hey, I can make random accurate guesses too! I just don't tell you about my failures...
- NateEag 4y ago
  I don't know what the author is referring to, but in NDE research, you can find plenty of claimed witnesses to incidents where someone awoke and promptly made a claim about reality that proved to be correct and which they had no clear way to have observed naturally. The most common one is probably knowing someone else has recently died, due to encountering the newly-dead in the apparent afterlife part of their NDE. Could that still suffer from the same selection bias problem? Sure. Do we have rigorous proof that this really happens as such? No, just various eyewitness testimonies saying that it did, and eyewitness testimony is famously unreliable. Still - if people really do come back from near-death and spontaneously report other deaths accurately without first checking for whether their perception was correct... that's kind of weird. Bruce Greyson apparently published a paper about the phenomenon, IIRC saying that they didn't find any instances of someone reporting a death incorrectly out of hundreds of reports of NDE-inspired death-knowledge claims. I've been meaning to dig that one up and look more closely at it, because that's at the very least pretty remarkable selection bias. Not sure I'm remembering the details right, though.
  - thechao 4y ago
    > you can find plenty of claimed witnesses to incidents where someone awoke and promptly made a claim about reality that proved to be correct and which they had no clear way to have observed naturally This is literally unbelievable. If what you're saying is true, it would be published in something like "Nature" or "Science". Please point to that paper. If it's not published in a journal of that prestige level, then it's certainly factually wrong.

trrbb 4y ago

astrange 4y ago

This is similar to "we're all just a simulation" - sure, maybe consciousness isn't in our brain and it's actually all in another dimension. But then how's it work over in the other dimension? It's gotta eventually actually be somewhere.

Animats 4y ago
That rabbit hole leads to a line of thinking. From the article: "Federico Faggin starts with the assumption that reality emerges from the free-will communications of a vast number of conscious entities". If we're living in a simulation, either it's insanely inefficient, uselessly simulating subatomic activity for hundreds of light years around. Or only stuff being looked at by some active entity is being simulated. Lots of games work that way. Most of the world is turned off most of the time. When two active entities previously running in unsynchronized simulations get close enough that their simulations have to sync, there can be artifacts as they sync up. Those should be noticeable. Some of the larger virtual world systems actually have that problem. But this is all probably bogus. There's a lot of wishful "consciousness must be special so that humans are important" in this line of thinking. As I point out occasionally, the place where AI does badly is not around "consciousness", whatever that is. It's around common sense and manipulation in unstructured situations. Or, as I like to put it, not screwing up in the next 30 seconds. Recently someone commented on here that octopi have those abilities. They're good at figuring out their environment, learn from others of their own kind, and are good at escaping. They're at least at dog level. Octopi are interesting because they are a separate evolution from mammals, with a much more distributed brain and a completely different vision system. This tells us there's more than one way to do it.
- nullish_signal 4y ago
  >If we're living in a simulation, either it's insanely inefficient, uselessly simulating subatomic activity for hundreds of light years around. OK, how much RAM and Energy did your PC consume to send this text, versus the 10 Chrome tab Virtual Machines, 20 svchost processes, Windows Defender scanning for malware.... How many predictive branch instructions does your CPU errantly run, and discard, every hour? How many of your thoughts contribute positively to the external or internal environment? How many in-fighting cells and viruses in yoir body contribute to you as a Person? And yet, what effort would it take to re-design Everything to completely avoid Parasitic Events? If the Greys spin up Universes and Conscious Agents to stab at un-solvable problem, I'd wager they need those Systems to be Realistic, not Efficient

jacknews 4y ago

"phenomena where consciousness appears to extend beyond the physical brain and body in both space and time." I think 'appears' is the important caveat, IMHO.

srcreigh 4y ago
It is the crux. There’s a latent belief that all reality can be measured objectively in controlled environments. There’s reasons why this cannot be true both inside and outside the scientific realm. For one, scientific progress couldn’t exist without a perpetually large area of measurements which have not been made or imagined yet; science is not useful unless there is value in the “hunch” - subjectively interesting but not (yet) objectively measurable phenomenon - something which has not been measured. Secondly, there’s the undeniable possibility that some aspects of reality simply can never be measured scientifically for some reason. The question then is, how else can that knowledge be obtained? To not adore appearances is to be both unscientific and un-beyond-scientific.

fsh 4y ago

Is this some sophisticated parody, or are the authors serious about this complete nonsense?

xyzzy4747 4y ago

I bet that robots will take over the world and wipe out all forms of life before consciousness is ever figured out.

tshaddox 4y ago
"But they don't really know what it's like to experience the smell of freshly baked cookie!..." chant the last stronghold of humans in unison as the AI army completes its annihilation of humanity.

thamer 4y ago

All four authors are listed as being part of the "Institute of Noetic Sciences", which researches topic such as paranormal phenomena, psychic abilities, telekinesis, and other pseudoscientific topics in the realm of alternative medicine. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institute_of_Noetic_Sciences https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institute_of_Noetic_Sciences

t-writescode 4y ago
Given the question they’re asking, wouldn’t it exactly be that sort of thing? I’m not sure what the argument about their historical stances is intended to do, except that it reflects consistency in their thinking. If consciousness is not emergent of brain matter, the hop to non-physical is very short.
eth0up 4y ago
>pseudoscientific It's difficult for me to view Edgar Mitchell as some lucky pseudoscientific vagabond who by luck happened to hitch a ride to the moon and return with a buch of dumb ideas. A minor adjustment to your chosen terminology could exalt at least one of the listed pseudo topics into an actual scientific one by replacing "psychic abilities" with PSI. From my experience, those with the most hostile sentiment for that particular subject have the least awareness of it beyond the standard James Randy, ie spoon bender stuff. Admittedly, telekinesis is tempting to berate, but not so much with telepathy. It's a stretch, perhaps trite to say, but hand-washing was not long ago considered alternative medicine.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

maroonblazer 4y ago

Odd that they don't mention Graziano's conceptual framework for consciousness[0]. It seems one of the most comprehensive theories that I've come across, although I'm only an interested layperson. [0]https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2116933119 https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2116933119

inphovore 4y ago

Consciousness is the inflection of our existential being. Our brains are quantum computers (without qubits, it is quantum holography.) The illusion of singular consciousness in our minds is the product of so many individual neurons entangling and coupling. It is existential reality which is consciousness (the universe peering back upon itself.) Our brains and bodies are merely the jellybags which keep the electrochemical animation stable, as well as providing sensors and actuators for interacting with our environments. Intelligence is the mitigation of uncertainty. If it doesn’t mitigate uncertainty it isn’t intelligence. Consciousness is not intelligent. Consciousness co-opts intelligence as a tool for survival, and intelligence co-opts consciousness as a memetic host.

satisfice 4y ago

The article accomplished its purpose with me. I started by scoffing at non-physicalism, but by the end I agreed that there is a basis not to scoff— which is all the authors claim to want. They are trying to create a little space for humility about alternative theoretical constructs. They are NOT trying to debunk physicalism.

amriksohata 4y ago

IN hinduism, the mind, ego and body are all separate things.

grantcas 4y ago

[dead]