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Aeon just had a great article on the consciousness, "Seeing and somethingness" https://aeon.co/essays/how-blindsight-answers-the-hard-problem-of-consciousness h

Aeon 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 ago
Like 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 ago
  People 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 ago
    The 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.
    - zasdffaa 4y ago
      We don't know what qualia are so it's an acceptable possibility to me (unprovable, mind) that such a circuit may 'experience' something. It would be unutterably basic if it happened, nonetheless I'm ok with that. There's also a view that consciousness is intrinsic to everything (ah, here you go https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/does-consciousness-pervade-the-universe/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/does-consciousnes...) which is a cheap, cheesy and IMO totally unacceptable way to 'explain' consciousness and I reject that as an explanation, but it doesn't make it actually wrong. Edit: missed your last line "We have explanation for how there can be experiences/qualia" - I'm surprised, you can explain it, got any links?
      - PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
        Sure, pan-qualism/pan-psychism may well turn out to be a respectable postion. [ fixed the missing "no" in the GP ]
        namero999 4y ago
        Panpsychism is untenable because it trades the hard problem of consciousness for the composition problem. The only consistent and coherent game in town is analytical idealism.
        zasdffaa 4y ago
        It might be a piss-poor explanation, because it doesn't explain anything, it presumes its conclusion, but that doesn't make it wrong. And if you throw in phrases like "composition problem" and "analytical idealism" the fer fuck's sake provide some simple explanation or something.
        namero999 4y ago
        Something that assumes its conclusion and doesn't explain anything is not even wrong... At any rate, given the context of the thread I didn't feel the need to clarify what the composition problem nor idealism are. But since you ask: The composition (aka combination) problem refers to the need to explain how multiple bits of consciousness combine together to form a united and cohesive experience such as yours or mine. The hard problem focuses instead on how quantities (matter) give rise to qualities (experience). Analytic Idealism is the view that experience is the ontological primitive. Both problems sublimate away. Yes, you can derive physics from it. In fact you don't even bother physics in any way: all we know about it remains valid under analytic idealism. If anything, many counterintuitive findings of QM fall into place under AI. If this pique your interest, here's a good intro https://www.essentiafoundation.org/analytic-idealism-course/ https://www.essentiafoundation.org/analytic-idealism-course/.
- gjm11 4y ago
  I would be interested in your response to the following thought experiment: After years of heroic work and ingenious insights, along with a lot of technological progress, we "solve" the "easy" problem of consciousness in the following (I admit implausibly in any foreseeable future) strong sense: (Note: I'm going into quite a lot of detail because I think that when people say things like "understanding how the machinery of consciousness works would not tell us anything about how it is possible to be truly conscious of anything at all" they are commonly underestimating what it would actually mean to understand how the machinery of consciousness works.) 1. There is a scanning device. You can strap yourself into this for half an hour, during which time it shows you images, plays you sounds, asks you to think particular kinds of thoughts, etc., all the while watching all your neurons, how they connect, which ones fire when under what circumstances, etc. It tries to model your peripheral as well as central nervous system, so it has a pretty good model of how all the bits of your body connect to your brain, and of how those bits of body actually operate. 2. There is a simulator. It can, in something approximating real time, pretty much duplicate the operation of a brain that has been scanned using the scanning device. It also has enough simulation of the body the brain's part of that it can e.g. provide the simulated brain with fairly realistic sensory inputs, and respond fairly realistically to its motor outputs. There's a UI that lets you see and hear what the simulated person is doing. 3. Researchers have figured out pretty much everything about the architecture of the brain, and it turns out to be reasonably modular, and they've built into the simulator a UI for looking at the structure, so that you can take a running simulation and explore it top-down or bottom-up or middle-out, either from the point of view of brain structure or that of cognition, perception, etc. 4. So, for instance, you can do the following. Inside the simulation, arrange for something fairly striking to happen to the simulated person. E.g., they're having a conversation with a friend, and the friend suddenly kicks them painfully in the shin. Some time passes and then (still, for the avoidance of doubt, in the simulation) they are asked about that experience, and they say (as the "real" person would) things like "I felt a sharp pain in my leg, and I felt surprised and also a bit betrayed. I trust that person less now." And you can watch the simulation at whatever level of abstraction you like, and observe the brain mechanisms that make all that happen. E.g., when they get kicked you can see the flow of neuron-activation from the place that's kicked, up the spinal cord, into the brain; the system can tell you "these neurons are active whenever the subject feels physical pain, and sometimes when they feel emotional distress, and sometimes when they remember being in pain" and "this cascade of visual processing is identifying the face in front of them as that of Joe Blorfle, and you can see here how these neurons associated with Joe Blorfle are firing while the conversation is happening, and when the pain happens you can see how these connections between the Joe Blorfle neurons and the pain neurons get strengthened a bit, and later on when the subject is asked about Joe Blorfle and the Joe Blorfle neurons fire, so do the pain ones. And you can see this big chunk of neural machinery here is making records of what happened so that the subject can remember it later; here's how the order in which things happen is represented, and here's how memories get linked up to the people and things and experiences involved, etc. And when he's asked about Joe Blorfle, you can see these bits of language-processing brain tissue are active. These bits here are taking input from the ears and identifying syllable boundaries, and these bits are identifying good candidates for the syllable being heard right now, and these other bits are linking together nearby syllables looking for plausible words, with plausibility being influenced by what notions the subject is attending to, and these other bits are putting together something that turns out to be rather like a parse tree, and, and, and ...". 5. That is: the linkage -- at least in terms of actual physical goings-on within the brain -- between being kicked in the shin by Joe Blorfle on Thursday, and expressing resentment when asked about Joe Blorfle on Saturday, is being accurately simulated, and the structure of what's being simulated is understood well enough that you can see its "moving parts" at higher or lower levels of abstraction. OK, so that's the scenario. I reiterate that it would be wildly optimistic to expect anything like this any time soon, but so far as I know nothing in it is impossible in principle. Question 1: Do you agree that something along these lines is possible in principle? [EDITED to add:] For the avoidance of doubt, of course it might well turn out that some of the analysis has to be done in terms not of particular neural "circuits" but e.g. of particular patterns of neural activation. (Consider a computer running a chess-playing program. You can't point to any part of its hardware and say "that bit is computing king safety", but you can explain what processes it goes through that compute king safety and how they relate to the hardware and its states. Similar things may happen in the brain. Or very different things that likewise mean that particular bits of computation aren't always done by specific bits of brain "hardware".) Question 2: If it happened, would you think there is still a "hard problem" left unsolved? Question 3: If you think there would still be a "hard problem" left unsolved, is that because you think someone in this scenario could imagine all the machinery revealed by the simulator operating perfectly without any actual qualia? (My answers, for reference: I think this is possible in principle. I think there would be no "hard problem" left, which makes me disinclined to believe that even now there is a "hard problem" that's as completely separate from the "easy" problem of "just" explaining how everything works as e.g. Chalmers suggests. I think that anyone who thinks they can imagine all the processes that give rise to (e.g.) a philosopher saying "I know how it feels for me to experience being kicked in the shin, and I think no mere simulation could truly capture that", in full detail, without any qualia being present, is simply fooling themselves, in the same way as I would be fooling myself if I said "I can imagine my computer doing all the things it does, exactly as it does, without any actual electrons being present".)
- icare_1er 4y ago
  I am re-reading Dennett's book and this is the best take I have found on the mystery of consciousness.
- otikik 4y ago
  > how it is possible to be conscious of anything at all I ... have always seen that as something obvious. On a high level, isn't consciousness the result of combining a bunch of neurons (a "hardware", of sorts) in certain preexisting configuration (a "software" of sorts) and stimuli (inputs) ?. To me the problem is on the details. The separation between layers is not needed because there's no limited consciousness needing to understand the system in the first place. All the encodings and pathways in all 3 levels are tortuous and non-intuitive, and profoundly intertwined. An image being seen through the eyes will end up being encoded as a bunch of electrical signals that will then sent to neurons that will pass it to other neurons until eventually certain other neurons will release molecules will get released through another end and that will activate other neurons and that gets encoded as "pleasure". But to me it is obvious that this is what's going on. The "hard part" is the reverse-engineering the software, the operative system and the hardware. This would be a deeply challenging technical puzzle - perhaps beyond our capabilities to tackle, perhaps it would require many generations of people. But I don't understand where this "philosophical hardness" is. I only see the so-called "easy" problems. What's mysterious about Consciousness the software/hardware it is part of is finicky and tricky, like something written by a crazy savant with a big ego. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saccade https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saccade
  - nicoburns 4y ago
    I think you're missing the point. A brain could encode "pleasure", and respond appropriately to that and other complex stimuli without there being anyone actually feeling that pleasure. But there is, and that's unexplained. That's not just a defect in our understanding of brains, it's something which we don't understand on the level of physics.
    - b33j0r 4y ago
      Yep. People talk about the hard problem, but it’s lots of things. The consciousness process might have obvious components, and many non-obvious ones, but until those factors explain why it seems like a first-person experience… Well dang, a “first-person experience” remains basically undefined! So we’re not even to that bridge yet! My guess is that both questions will be answered at about the same time. I highly doubt that we’ll just get scientifically used to “well we get how brains work, so that’s the self.” At least as long as anyone resembling us keeps wondering, we’ll keep looking.
- mtlmtlmtlmtl 4y ago
  Dennett most certainly tackles the "hard problem", by convincingly arguing the problem is ill-defined and not a real problem. The "hard problem" is not some Riemann Hypothesis of philosophy. Its status as a problem to be solved is highly contentious.
  - aeneasmackenzie 4y ago
    Does he answer the question “why qualia, of any kind, ever?” > Dennett most certainly tackles the "hard problem", by convincingly arguing the problem is ill-defined and not a real problem. No, like everyone else he admits defeat before it and tries to define it away. Whatever the relationship between qualia and physical reality, we experience them (I do. Dennett might not, haha) which requires some explanation. Once you have that everything else is easy, but there’s no reason for there to be an experience at all.
    - mtlmtlmtlmtl 4y ago
      I'm not a philosopher, but arguments for the hard problem always come off as very circular to me. And when I dig deeper, it essentially boils down to "but it sure feels like there are qualia, so there must be" Look, it certainly feels that way to me too. But that's not an argument. It's not even evidence. It also feels like it's impossible for me not to exist, and yet the evidence has me entirely convinced that will happen one day. In any case, as a non-philosopher I can only gather that among philosophers, this is a highly contentious issue in philosophy of mind, and let the sides try to convince me. When I read Dennett, he uses an immense breadth of knowledge on neural anatomy, computation, evolution, and cognitive psychology. When I read arguments from the likes of Chalmers and Searle, I find highly contrived, seemingly circular thought experiments that are purposely constructed to purport their argument as fundamentally true. Feels more like theology to me.
      - PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
        > it essentially boils down to "but it sure feels like there are qualia, so there must be" no. The argument is that "it feels like something to be me", and then to ask "how can it be possible to feel anything?" qualia is a term from philosophy that is essentially a synonym for "having an experience" or "it is like something to be X" nobody says "it feels like there are qualia". the closest would be "i have experience, and we call that qualia"
- qudat 4y ago
  How is consciousness possible? Here's my naive answer with just a bachelors in neuroscience. There are some "business requirements" as far as I know. We need: - space and time - memory - inputs - decision making models - attention You need space and time because thinking is a verb. Action is required which needs the passage of time. You need memory in order to link past events with current ones. I'm not strictly talking about memory from earlier in the year or day, but also working memory from what you perceived a second ago. Continuity seems essential. Inputs are require because we need a data stream to grapple onto and spark brain activity. The brain can obviously cause its own activity as well. After that it's just a recursive ETL function via the thalamo-cortical loop [1]. The "self" doesn't necessarily need to live in this loop, but it needs access to the data stream. Inputs trigger neurons/glial that recall past events which all get fed into a bunch of decision making models that spits out new thoughts or decisions which cause us to act. The loop is happening so quickly and chaotically that coupled with randomness, short term and long term memory ... you've essentially got a system to explain creativity and "free will". Really, consciousness is just an emergent property of a nervous system. It doesn't seem nearly as magical through this lens but that's what makes it so convincing to me. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cortico-basal_ganglia-thalamo-cortical_loop#Research https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cortico-basal_ganglia-thalamo-...
  - alok-g 4y ago
    Going by this, what more do we need to make machines conscious, if anything?
  - spoonfeeder006 4y ago
    What you are describing regarding inputs, brain activity on data stream, and how its just a recursive ETL function and such, is describing behavior and computation though You have some input that goes into the brain, and produces neural firings that trigger actuators to respond to that stimulus What I don't understand is why are we conscious beings instead of extremely complex bio-computation machines exhibiting memory, inputs, and complex behaviors such as attention and decision making models, all with behavioral actuators, and all this simulating thought and intelligence but really have no entity whatsoever thats actually experiencing stuff? I've always wondered what ultimately makes neurons and all so special that they produce conciousness. Does a rock that undergoes vibrations have some sort of consciousness associated with it, if not much less than what is seen in a human? So maybe consciousness is an inherent property of the universe that is in a plane beyond what the 5 senses can pick up on? But that in humans it finds a greater catalyst or something than in animals, plants, or minerals? I dunno, what do you think? Is there anything rational in that train of thought or did I smoke too much crack again lol TBH I take a lot of my inspiration of this from Baha'i Faith, which teaches that science and religion are essentially in harmony (i.e. different views on the same reality). To me a lot of the bahai teachings are really deep and elevating (i.e. making me a better person and less selfish by helping me see something more valuable than survival tendencies) Hopefully I can live by it though
- labrador 4y ago
  This is my eternal complaint. Like a fish not noticing water, people don't mention it because it is a given. I'm not even sure how many people are conscious of being conscious.
TaupeRanger 4y ago
Just as handwavy as any other explanation of consciousness. I can make an electronic device that runs a Python program that predicts how input affects the device. That doesn't make the device conscious.
- sdht0 4y ago
  A sufficiently advanced such Python program will probably actually be conscious.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - namero999 4y ago
    Of course not. And sorry if I've missed the sarcasm :)
    - jamiek88 4y ago
      Why of course not?
      - namero999 4y ago
        What makes you think that a simulation of a process is the process itself? If you were to simulate on silicon kidney function down to sub-particle precision, would you expect your computer to pee on your desk? So why would you expect consciousness to be present in a simulation of brain activity or brain complexity? Can you point to _any_ instance of presumed consciousness in a non-biological complex?
        TaupeRanger 4y ago
        Yes, you would expect the kidney to produce its expected outputs to an entity within" the simulation. Of course it wouldn't produce the same things outside the simulation.
  - 4y ago
jiggywiggy 4y ago
These theories just dont' even try to prove that the brain creates consciousness. They just assume it's the case.
gjm11 4y ago
For anyone who's wondering why the strange title: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Being_and_Nothingness https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Being_and_Nothingness
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]

PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago

Like 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 ago
People 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 ago
  The 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.
  - zasdffaa 4y ago
    We don't know what qualia are so it's an acceptable possibility to me (unprovable, mind) that such a circuit may 'experience' something. It would be unutterably basic if it happened, nonetheless I'm ok with that. There's also a view that consciousness is intrinsic to everything (ah, here you go https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/does-consciousness-pervade-the-universe/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/does-consciousnes...) which is a cheap, cheesy and IMO totally unacceptable way to 'explain' consciousness and I reject that as an explanation, but it doesn't make it actually wrong. Edit: missed your last line "We have explanation for how there can be experiences/qualia" - I'm surprised, you can explain it, got any links?
    - PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
      Sure, pan-qualism/pan-psychism may well turn out to be a respectable postion. [ fixed the missing "no" in the GP ]
      - namero999 4y ago
        Panpsychism is untenable because it trades the hard problem of consciousness for the composition problem. The only consistent and coherent game in town is analytical idealism.
        zasdffaa 4y ago
        It might be a piss-poor explanation, because it doesn't explain anything, it presumes its conclusion, but that doesn't make it wrong. And if you throw in phrases like "composition problem" and "analytical idealism" the fer fuck's sake provide some simple explanation or something.
        namero999 4y ago
        Something that assumes its conclusion and doesn't explain anything is not even wrong... At any rate, given the context of the thread I didn't feel the need to clarify what the composition problem nor idealism are. But since you ask: The composition (aka combination) problem refers to the need to explain how multiple bits of consciousness combine together to form a united and cohesive experience such as yours or mine. The hard problem focuses instead on how quantities (matter) give rise to qualities (experience). Analytic Idealism is the view that experience is the ontological primitive. Both problems sublimate away. Yes, you can derive physics from it. In fact you don't even bother physics in any way: all we know about it remains valid under analytic idealism. If anything, many counterintuitive findings of QM fall into place under AI. If this pique your interest, here's a good intro https://www.essentiafoundation.org/analytic-idealism-course/ https://www.essentiafoundation.org/analytic-idealism-course/.
gjm11 4y ago
I would be interested in your response to the following thought experiment: After years of heroic work and ingenious insights, along with a lot of technological progress, we "solve" the "easy" problem of consciousness in the following (I admit implausibly in any foreseeable future) strong sense: (Note: I'm going into quite a lot of detail because I think that when people say things like "understanding how the machinery of consciousness works would not tell us anything about how it is possible to be truly conscious of anything at all" they are commonly underestimating what it would actually mean to understand how the machinery of consciousness works.) 1. There is a scanning device. You can strap yourself into this for half an hour, during which time it shows you images, plays you sounds, asks you to think particular kinds of thoughts, etc., all the while watching all your neurons, how they connect, which ones fire when under what circumstances, etc. It tries to model your peripheral as well as central nervous system, so it has a pretty good model of how all the bits of your body connect to your brain, and of how those bits of body actually operate. 2. There is a simulator. It can, in something approximating real time, pretty much duplicate the operation of a brain that has been scanned using the scanning device. It also has enough simulation of the body the brain's part of that it can e.g. provide the simulated brain with fairly realistic sensory inputs, and respond fairly realistically to its motor outputs. There's a UI that lets you see and hear what the simulated person is doing. 3. Researchers have figured out pretty much everything about the architecture of the brain, and it turns out to be reasonably modular, and they've built into the simulator a UI for looking at the structure, so that you can take a running simulation and explore it top-down or bottom-up or middle-out, either from the point of view of brain structure or that of cognition, perception, etc. 4. So, for instance, you can do the following. Inside the simulation, arrange for something fairly striking to happen to the simulated person. E.g., they're having a conversation with a friend, and the friend suddenly kicks them painfully in the shin. Some time passes and then (still, for the avoidance of doubt, in the simulation) they are asked about that experience, and they say (as the "real" person would) things like "I felt a sharp pain in my leg, and I felt surprised and also a bit betrayed. I trust that person less now." And you can watch the simulation at whatever level of abstraction you like, and observe the brain mechanisms that make all that happen. E.g., when they get kicked you can see the flow of neuron-activation from the place that's kicked, up the spinal cord, into the brain; the system can tell you "these neurons are active whenever the subject feels physical pain, and sometimes when they feel emotional distress, and sometimes when they remember being in pain" and "this cascade of visual processing is identifying the face in front of them as that of Joe Blorfle, and you can see here how these neurons associated with Joe Blorfle are firing while the conversation is happening, and when the pain happens you can see how these connections between the Joe Blorfle neurons and the pain neurons get strengthened a bit, and later on when the subject is asked about Joe Blorfle and the Joe Blorfle neurons fire, so do the pain ones. And you can see this big chunk of neural machinery here is making records of what happened so that the subject can remember it later; here's how the order in which things happen is represented, and here's how memories get linked up to the people and things and experiences involved, etc. And when he's asked about Joe Blorfle, you can see these bits of language-processing brain tissue are active. These bits here are taking input from the ears and identifying syllable boundaries, and these bits are identifying good candidates for the syllable being heard right now, and these other bits are linking together nearby syllables looking for plausible words, with plausibility being influenced by what notions the subject is attending to, and these other bits are putting together something that turns out to be rather like a parse tree, and, and, and ...". 5. That is: the linkage -- at least in terms of actual physical goings-on within the brain -- between being kicked in the shin by Joe Blorfle on Thursday, and expressing resentment when asked about Joe Blorfle on Saturday, is being accurately simulated, and the structure of what's being simulated is understood well enough that you can see its "moving parts" at higher or lower levels of abstraction. OK, so that's the scenario. I reiterate that it would be wildly optimistic to expect anything like this any time soon, but so far as I know nothing in it is impossible in principle. Question 1: Do you agree that something along these lines is possible in principle? [EDITED to add:] For the avoidance of doubt, of course it might well turn out that some of the analysis has to be done in terms not of particular neural "circuits" but e.g. of particular patterns of neural activation. (Consider a computer running a chess-playing program. You can't point to any part of its hardware and say "that bit is computing king safety", but you can explain what processes it goes through that compute king safety and how they relate to the hardware and its states. Similar things may happen in the brain. Or very different things that likewise mean that particular bits of computation aren't always done by specific bits of brain "hardware".) Question 2: If it happened, would you think there is still a "hard problem" left unsolved? Question 3: If you think there would still be a "hard problem" left unsolved, is that because you think someone in this scenario could imagine all the machinery revealed by the simulator operating perfectly without any actual qualia? (My answers, for reference: I think this is possible in principle. I think there would be no "hard problem" left, which makes me disinclined to believe that even now there is a "hard problem" that's as completely separate from the "easy" problem of "just" explaining how everything works as e.g. Chalmers suggests. I think that anyone who thinks they can imagine all the processes that give rise to (e.g.) a philosopher saying "I know how it feels for me to experience being kicked in the shin, and I think no mere simulation could truly capture that", in full detail, without any qualia being present, is simply fooling themselves, in the same way as I would be fooling myself if I said "I can imagine my computer doing all the things it does, exactly as it does, without any actual electrons being present".)
icare_1er 4y ago
I am re-reading Dennett's book and this is the best take I have found on the mystery of consciousness.
otikik 4y ago
> how it is possible to be conscious of anything at all I ... have always seen that as something obvious. On a high level, isn't consciousness the result of combining a bunch of neurons (a "hardware", of sorts) in certain preexisting configuration (a "software" of sorts) and stimuli (inputs) ?. To me the problem is on the details. The separation between layers is not needed because there's no limited consciousness needing to understand the system in the first place. All the encodings and pathways in all 3 levels are tortuous and non-intuitive, and profoundly intertwined. An image being seen through the eyes will end up being encoded as a bunch of electrical signals that will then sent to neurons that will pass it to other neurons until eventually certain other neurons will release molecules will get released through another end and that will activate other neurons and that gets encoded as "pleasure". But to me it is obvious that this is what's going on. The "hard part" is the reverse-engineering the software, the operative system and the hardware. This would be a deeply challenging technical puzzle - perhaps beyond our capabilities to tackle, perhaps it would require many generations of people. But I don't understand where this "philosophical hardness" is. I only see the so-called "easy" problems. What's mysterious about Consciousness the software/hardware it is part of is finicky and tricky, like something written by a crazy savant with a big ego. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saccade https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saccade
- nicoburns 4y ago
  I think you're missing the point. A brain could encode "pleasure", and respond appropriately to that and other complex stimuli without there being anyone actually feeling that pleasure. But there is, and that's unexplained. That's not just a defect in our understanding of brains, it's something which we don't understand on the level of physics.
  - b33j0r 4y ago
    Yep. People talk about the hard problem, but it’s lots of things. The consciousness process might have obvious components, and many non-obvious ones, but until those factors explain why it seems like a first-person experience… Well dang, a “first-person experience” remains basically undefined! So we’re not even to that bridge yet! My guess is that both questions will be answered at about the same time. I highly doubt that we’ll just get scientifically used to “well we get how brains work, so that’s the self.” At least as long as anyone resembling us keeps wondering, we’ll keep looking.
mtlmtlmtlmtl 4y ago
Dennett most certainly tackles the "hard problem", by convincingly arguing the problem is ill-defined and not a real problem. The "hard problem" is not some Riemann Hypothesis of philosophy. Its status as a problem to be solved is highly contentious.
- aeneasmackenzie 4y ago
  Does he answer the question “why qualia, of any kind, ever?” > Dennett most certainly tackles the "hard problem", by convincingly arguing the problem is ill-defined and not a real problem. No, like everyone else he admits defeat before it and tries to define it away. Whatever the relationship between qualia and physical reality, we experience them (I do. Dennett might not, haha) which requires some explanation. Once you have that everything else is easy, but there’s no reason for there to be an experience at all.
  - mtlmtlmtlmtl 4y ago
    I'm not a philosopher, but arguments for the hard problem always come off as very circular to me. And when I dig deeper, it essentially boils down to "but it sure feels like there are qualia, so there must be" Look, it certainly feels that way to me too. But that's not an argument. It's not even evidence. It also feels like it's impossible for me not to exist, and yet the evidence has me entirely convinced that will happen one day. In any case, as a non-philosopher I can only gather that among philosophers, this is a highly contentious issue in philosophy of mind, and let the sides try to convince me. When I read Dennett, he uses an immense breadth of knowledge on neural anatomy, computation, evolution, and cognitive psychology. When I read arguments from the likes of Chalmers and Searle, I find highly contrived, seemingly circular thought experiments that are purposely constructed to purport their argument as fundamentally true. Feels more like theology to me.
    - PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
      > it essentially boils down to "but it sure feels like there are qualia, so there must be" no. The argument is that "it feels like something to be me", and then to ask "how can it be possible to feel anything?" qualia is a term from philosophy that is essentially a synonym for "having an experience" or "it is like something to be X" nobody says "it feels like there are qualia". the closest would be "i have experience, and we call that qualia"
qudat 4y ago
How is consciousness possible? Here's my naive answer with just a bachelors in neuroscience. There are some "business requirements" as far as I know. We need: - space and time - memory - inputs - decision making models - attention You need space and time because thinking is a verb. Action is required which needs the passage of time. You need memory in order to link past events with current ones. I'm not strictly talking about memory from earlier in the year or day, but also working memory from what you perceived a second ago. Continuity seems essential. Inputs are require because we need a data stream to grapple onto and spark brain activity. The brain can obviously cause its own activity as well. After that it's just a recursive ETL function via the thalamo-cortical loop [1]. The "self" doesn't necessarily need to live in this loop, but it needs access to the data stream. Inputs trigger neurons/glial that recall past events which all get fed into a bunch of decision making models that spits out new thoughts or decisions which cause us to act. The loop is happening so quickly and chaotically that coupled with randomness, short term and long term memory ... you've essentially got a system to explain creativity and "free will". Really, consciousness is just an emergent property of a nervous system. It doesn't seem nearly as magical through this lens but that's what makes it so convincing to me. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cortico-basal_ganglia-thalamo-cortical_loop#Research https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cortico-basal_ganglia-thalamo-...
- alok-g 4y ago
  Going by this, what more do we need to make machines conscious, if anything?
- spoonfeeder006 4y ago
  What you are describing regarding inputs, brain activity on data stream, and how its just a recursive ETL function and such, is describing behavior and computation though You have some input that goes into the brain, and produces neural firings that trigger actuators to respond to that stimulus What I don't understand is why are we conscious beings instead of extremely complex bio-computation machines exhibiting memory, inputs, and complex behaviors such as attention and decision making models, all with behavioral actuators, and all this simulating thought and intelligence but really have no entity whatsoever thats actually experiencing stuff? I've always wondered what ultimately makes neurons and all so special that they produce conciousness. Does a rock that undergoes vibrations have some sort of consciousness associated with it, if not much less than what is seen in a human? So maybe consciousness is an inherent property of the universe that is in a plane beyond what the 5 senses can pick up on? But that in humans it finds a greater catalyst or something than in animals, plants, or minerals? I dunno, what do you think? Is there anything rational in that train of thought or did I smoke too much crack again lol TBH I take a lot of my inspiration of this from Baha'i Faith, which teaches that science and religion are essentially in harmony (i.e. different views on the same reality). To me a lot of the bahai teachings are really deep and elevating (i.e. making me a better person and less selfish by helping me see something more valuable than survival tendencies) Hopefully I can live by it though
labrador 4y ago
This is my eternal complaint. Like a fish not noticing water, people don't mention it because it is a given. I'm not even sure how many people are conscious of being conscious.

TaupeRanger 4y ago

Just as handwavy as any other explanation of consciousness. I can make an electronic device that runs a Python program that predicts how input affects the device. That doesn't make the device conscious.

sdht0 4y ago
A sufficiently advanced such Python program will probably actually be conscious.
- deleted 4y ago
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- namero999 4y ago
  Of course not. And sorry if I've missed the sarcasm :)
  - jamiek88 4y ago
    Why of course not?
    - namero999 4y ago
      What makes you think that a simulation of a process is the process itself? If you were to simulate on silicon kidney function down to sub-particle precision, would you expect your computer to pee on your desk? So why would you expect consciousness to be present in a simulation of brain activity or brain complexity? Can you point to _any_ instance of presumed consciousness in a non-biological complex?
      - TaupeRanger 4y ago
        Yes, you would expect the kidney to produce its expected outputs to an entity within" the simulation. Of course it wouldn't produce the same things outside the simulation.
- 4y ago

jiggywiggy 4y ago

These theories just dont' even try to prove that the brain creates consciousness. They just assume it's the case.

gjm11 4y ago

For anyone who's wondering why the strange title: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Being_and_Nothingness https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Being_and_Nothingness

deleted 4y ago
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