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What is it like to have a brain? Ways of looking at consciousness
- comfypotato 4y agoRight off the bat it seemed like it was saying experts have changed their tone recently. Saying "we're further from understanding consciousness than we thought we were". It never goes on to elaborate this point. Great book review. If I had more time, I would snap up the book immediately. The review left me wondering if the book elaborates on the above ^^^. I might make the time to read it.
- Hemospectrum 4y ago> Right off the bat This might not be a deliberate reference to Nagel (as mentioned in the article) but at least it's thematically appropriate.
- comfypotato 4y agoPerhaps. Or a strategy of the author to keep me reading until the end (it worked!)
- nsxwolf 4y agoI am glad, because for years the prevailing attitude was that there's nothing special or interesting about consciousness at all, that it doesn't really exist, it's an illusion, etc. I don't think we'll ever be able to fully explain it in scientific terms, because not everything is in the realm of scientific knowledge.
- notfed 4y agoWhat scares me is that some leading AI researchers hold this view (that consciousness in general is nothing special) and it makes them come across as unempathetic, as if all conscious beings---meat or AI---are simply computers and in turn pain is just some kind of computation and therefore that it's silly to even discuss taking precautions to prevent any kind of AI suffering.
- opportune 4y agoThat’s because consciousness is not well-defined and might as well be woo. The verbiage around it is the same as a “soul” Define it rigorously and show a physical basis and you might have something to work with.
- notfed 4y agoAll qualia (which consciousness itself closes over) are impossible to rigorously define with words. Attempts to do so will come across as woo. What we can do however is experience qualia first-hand, and prove to ourselves that they exist. While we may never know if we're experiencing them the same way as each other, the fact that we can experience qualia at all is undeniable, and the question of why we can do so is the real question being asked here.
- grantcas 4y agoIt's becoming clear that with all the brain and consciousness theories out there, the proof will be in the pudding. By this I mean, can any particular theory be used to create a human adult level conscious machine. My bet is on the late Gerald Edelman's Extended Theory of Neuronal Group Selection. The lead group in robotics based on this theory is the Neurorobotics Lab at UC at Irvine. Dr. Edelman distinguished between primary consciousness, which came first in evolution, and that humans share with other conscious animals, and higher order consciousness, which came to only humans with the acquisition of language. A machine with primary consciousness will probably have to come first. What I find special about the TNGS is the Darwin series of automata created at the Neurosciences Institute by Dr. Edelman and his colleagues in the 1990's and 2000's. These machines perform in the real world, not in a restricted simulated world, and display convincing physical behavior indicative of higher psychological functions necessary for consciousness, such as perceptual categorization, memory, and learning. They are based on realistic models of the parts of the biological brain that the theory claims subserve these functions. The extended TNGS allows for the emergence of consciousness based only on further evolutionary development of the brain areas responsible for these functions, in a parsimonious way. No other research I've encountered is anywhere near as convincing. I post because on almost every video and article about the brain and consciousness that I encounter, the attitude seems to be that we still know next to nothing about how the brain and consciousness work; that there's lots of data but no unifying theory. I believe the extended TNGS is that theory. My motivation is to keep that theory in front of the public. And obviously, I consider it the route to a truly conscious machine, primary and higher-order. My advice to people who want to create a conscious machine is to seriously ground themselves in the extended TNGS and the Darwin automata first, and proceed from there, by applying to Jeff Krichmar's lab at UC Irvine, possibly. Dr. Edelman's roadmap to a conscious machine is at https://arxiv.org/abs/2105.10461 https://arxiv.org/abs/2105.10461
- oldstrangers 4y agoJust blindly bought this book because I think consciousness is one of the most fascinating unexplained aspects of our universe.
- flockonus 4y agoI wish I got the appreciation.. would you be able to describe what is fascinating about it?
- namero999 4y agoIt's the ultimate riddle.
- cscurmudgeon 4y agoHere is a good overview of the problem (and the controversy): https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousnes...
- 53r3PB9769ba 4y agoMaybe I'm a p-zombie then, because I just don't get it. I've spent hours upon hours thinking about thinking and observing my own thought processes and I don't see anything that couldn't be explained scientifically.
- namero999 4y agoOne must explain how the jump from quantities to qualities works.
- notfed 4y agoFor starters: - Why is there something rather than nothing? - Does a universe with no one in it to observe it count as something or nothing? Then, imagine we're building an AI and want to know whether it's reached our level or not: - How can we determine whether the AI experiences qualia the same (or similar) way we do, and isn't lying? - Where to draw the line between conscious being and computer?
- lifefeed 4y agoAeon just had a great article on the consciousness, "Seeing and somethingness" https://aeon.co/essays/how-blindsight-answers-the-hard-problem-of-consciousness https://aeon.co/essays/how-blindsight-answers-the-hard-probl... It argues that consciousness evolved out of sensation, where we developed an "inner self" to predict how sensations would affect us, and it's that inner self that became our conscious. Don't miss out on the comments section, the author answers a lot of question in there.
- PaulDavisThe1st 4y agoLike Dennett's book "Consciousness Explained", the Aeon article falls into the category of explaining what we are conscious of, not how it is possible to be conscious of anything at all. It does not really tackle Chalmers "hard problem of consciousness", despite the subtitle.
- layer8 4y agoPeople fundamentally disagree about whether there is anything besides the “of”. My personal introspection tells mere there is only “of”, because what I perceive as my consciousness, is, by virtue of being a perception, in the end just an “of” itself. There is some sort of recursivity involved in the whole construct of consciousness, which makes it hard to get a grasp on. In some sense, consciousness is just that, being the perceptor and the perceptee at the same time. This recursitivity or fixedpointness will probably be key to a precise understanding of the whole shebang.
- PaulDavisThe1st 4y agoThe argument you're making is just eliding the "hard problem". We can trivially imagine an electronic circuit that registers different current levels when exposed to red or blue light. Nobody (that I'm aware of) suggests that there is an experience within the electronic circuit, despite the fact that it "senses" different frequencies in the electromagnetic spectrum. The circuit is qualia-free. You, on the other hand, are qualia-full. Whether the experience you have when a red object is in front of you derives purely from your optical sensory apparatus, or if it derives from a self-reflective awareness that your brain is dealing with "red" really makes no difference to the central point: you have an experience. We have no explanation for how there can be experiences/qualia, and possibly, because they are either extremely or completely subjective, we may never any means of studying their existence.
- csours 4y agoI wonder how this compares with 'The Society of the Mind'
- uoaei 4y agoConsciousness vs awareness vs sentience are terms that really need some society-scale effort to nail down what we mean by one or another. The conversation circles round and round because many folks talk past each other or interpret discussions in ways that the writer didn't intend. (I'm not saying the answer is available today if only we solve this dialectical issue.) Philosophers of consciousness define "consciousness" as "phenomenological experience" in the barest, most unqualified sense, ie, the experience of "yellow" when photons of wavelength ~580nm strike a visual sensory organ of some kind of cognitive system. Note that the above does not automatically imply that the experience is understood or even recognized. A lot of armchair philosophers and intellectual hobbyists conflate the term "consciousness" with the notion of having some kind of mental model through which to comprehend the experience (what I call "awareness"), or an understanding of the dichotomy between self vs environment (what I call "sentience", ie, "self-awareness"). Acting through anthropocentrism, it is easy to assume that the three are inextricable, but I don't think that perspective is the way forward toward understanding of consciousness per se.
- comfypotato 4y agoYou sound like you'd be into the idea of "qualia" if you're not already aware.
- nickmain 4y ago"Metacognition" is a better term for what many refer to as consciousness.
- aeneasmackenzie 4y agoIt is not. That I can think about my thinking doesn’t help at all with the question of why I can think.
- gbro3n 4y agoWhat I rarely see / hear articulated well enough, and am not even sure that I can, are questions around why _I_ have consciousness. I understand the reasons why a body might develop meta cognition, and how it's advantageous for a being to be aware of it's thoughts. But none of this explains why my body is attached to _this_ consciousness and not another. 'Experience' is the key term I feel when the phenomenal aspect of consciousness is discussed, but I feel many don't understand this view point and attempt to explain it away as something reducable or inevitable.
- seydor 4y agoIt's time to upgrade this folk philosophy of mind and its obsession with ever-elusive "consciousness" with theories of intelligence build on neuroscientific, cellular and developmental underpinnings.
- agumonkey 4y agoMaybe we have two system, an imaginary layer and an accepted reality layer, dreams happen in the first one, experience in the other one. Mania happens when first former leaks in the latter.
- steve_john 4y agoThis is a reminder that, in the end, House's book is not about consciousness — it is about a set of ways for looking at it.
- andirk 4y ago"How rare and beautiful it is to even exist." --some song lyric
- ryeights 4y agoCan't believe / How strange it is to be anything at all.
- inphovore 4y agoAll matter in the Universe is dormant consciousness. Living systems animate this through electro chemical perturbation of the quantum states. It is existential being which is consciousness and our brains are localized composite self identifying subjectives of this phenomena.
- smusamashah 4y agoIf we had a system that can show us our thought process and we could explain every aspect of it, will we still call it being conscious? (took this question from Westworld where Maeve gets her hands on the tablet showing what she is thinking at that moment)
- sweetbacon 4y agoI feel like yes, or at least have a new name. Nature seems to love emergence at different levels, with little clear delineation beween, and very different rules in between (particles to elements, elements to chemistry, etc).
- smusamashah 4y agoThis question extends to the likes of GPT-3/SD etc which generate text and images based on statistics and probability of things they have learned with no 'understanding'. We can explain how and why they generate a particular piece. You already agree and the point I was making is that we might be able to call GPT-15 conscious or at least won't be able to say that it's not.
- prng2021 4y agoTo me, David Chalmer is really overrated as a philosopher and so are his ideas about consciousness. Essentially everything is an example of emergence and this is no different. Yes we absolutely do need to have words like "chair" as a level of abstraction. Yes we do need the word "consciousness" to talk about this quality/ability humans have which is so hard to describe but encompasses self awareness and experience (both also emergent). Underlying all these emergent phenomenon is always what Chalmers brushes off as easy. What he'd probably describe as the world of matter/energy and quantum physics. Here's a variation of a common thought experiment: Remove every atom from a person's brain, one by one until they are clinically dead. Somewhere along the way to death, that person is going to be right on the cusp of being a conscious human being. It wouldn't be a single moment. There would be a long period of removing atoms where observers could have endless debates about when the lights go out. Think of some very gradually going colorblind. Just like a gradient of color blindness, there would be a gradient of consciousness. From normal levels, to octopus levels (not literally), to newborn baby levels, bug level, etc until death. This makes it clear to me that consciousness truly is emergent from matter/energy. There's no magic behind it, just mystery because we don't understand it.
- maroonblazer 4y ago> There's no magic behind it, just mystery because we don't understand it. How is this different from, or inconsistent with, Chalmers' ideas about consciousness?
- prng2021 4y agoHe believes that consciousness cannot be reduced to atomic level phenomena. That kind of discussion is only about his so-called easy problem. To him, there is something beyond that. I refer to that "something" as magic because I believe there isn't anything beyond matter/energy to describe all examples of emergence, including consciousness. Going to my original comment's example of removing atoms from a brain, the number of atoms, which atoms, and interactions between the atoms is the mystery.
- 4y ago
- phs318u 4y agoReading through the comments I get the sense that there's something missing in our attempts to link "qualia" to hardware/wetware. My brain is made of neurons but "I" am not my neurons in and of themselves. There seems to be an emergent system of collective behaviour and responses to inputs that I call me. If a madman were to perform an experiment, successively scooping out teaspons of brain matter from my skull, I would start out being "me", but at some point, I would no longer be me (or perhaps anyone at all in the sense of being a conscious human). So while the hardware/wetware is a requirement, the conscious being "me" that I feel that I am, seems to be an emergent property of the organisation and dare I say "training" (tuning?) of this hardware. So, if "I" am defined at an emergent level above the mere hardware, then there must be way of describing/defining the model of me. Intuitively, we build models of each other, especially people we know well. What is that model beyond an expectation/predictive model of behaviour based on possible inputs? I feel that's where the gold is. Full disclosure: I am just a fascinated bystander to this discussion. If this comment has elicited eye-rolls from those more familiar with the state of play, my apologies.
- qudat 4y agoI think you might enjoy Searle: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0XTDLq34M18 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0XTDLq34M18
- spoonfeeder006 4y ago> What is it like to have a brain? I wouldn't even know
- thenext10years 4y agoIf I am God, I will be bored because I am all knowing, all powerful, all present. Is like playing a RPG game with all the cheat codes. So I created a world that I will not remember who I am, when I reborn, I randomly spawn in a family. This way, I can play the game, without getting bored, forever and ever. Deep down knowing that if the game eventually ends, I am still omniscient, omnipotent and omnipresent
- zone411 4y agoI had the same idea. It might or might not have been under the influence of drugs but I have to say that it is interesting to explore. It's easy to explain to people who played video games.
- avgcorrection 4y agoThis idea is a very common alternative spirituality thing.
- oifjsidjf 4y agoAssuming that "boredom" exists for such a being as God is a human projection that might have zero relevance in the domain of the absolute.
- mungoman2 4y agoInteresting short story The Egg explores an similar idea: http://www.galactanet.com/oneoff/theegg_mod.html http://www.galactanet.com/oneoff/theegg_mod.html
- deca 4y ago