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I am sorry to disappoint but I think consciousness is the one thing that we will never be able to solve physically. It is perhaps the only thing that is true ab

I am sorry to disappoint but I think consciousness is the one thing that we will never be able to solve physically. It is perhaps the only thing that is true about that universe, that I somehow exists. Everything else is simply derived from that and might as well be an illusion (perhaps a very consistent and steady illusion). > It really deserves more attention and awareness among geeks and the general public. There's 0 interest in consciousness because it's so hard to pay attention and realize that it exists. We go about our days for weeks, months, years and even decades without even noticing that consciousness is a thing.

elevaet 4y ago
> We go about our days for weeks, months, years and even decades without even noticing that consciousness is a thing. Do we? I feel like I'm constantly reflecting on it and trying to make sense of it, and that I'm certainly not alone. I'd like to think that it's part of being human to turn the lens back on itself and wonder "what am I?" But I suppose some people could care less for navel gazing.
FrustratedMonky 4y ago
This is a common view, but it is based on humans thinking they are special. “My own thoughts are so amazing”, “my own subjective reality is so real to me”, thus surely this is unexplainable. When really, humans give themselves (their own thoughts) way too much credit and most are barely aware of their own thoughts, barely self-aware at all. It is easy to say something is ‘un-explainable’ and thus ‘must be in some otherworldly realm that is beyond comprehension’, if one is not able to observer the problem. Most humans aren’t self-aware enough to know their own thoughts or examine where those thoughts come from. Just a few decades ago simple voice recognition was deemed ‘a totally human ability that the computer will never accomplish’, now it is ordinary. It comes down to humans internal subjective reality is both amazing and ‘unknowable to the outside’, ’un-observable’, thus un-testable. But then we make this giant leap that nothing we will ever build will also have some ‘internal subjective reality’. It keeps coming up that GPT is a glorified auto-complete, but then never explain how a human isn’t also just an ‘auto-complete’ machine, just going through the day twitching at stimuli. Why do we think a human doing copy/paste, and regurgitating something they heard, is special, but if a computer does then suddenly it is completely invalid to think they could ever be conscious.
- theobromananda 4y ago
  What you are referring to is the soft problem of consciousness, the contents of consciousness. You are probably right that the contents of human consciousness, or qualia, can be approximated by our understanding and technology to a very high degree given enough time. However, OP was referring to the hard problem of consciousness. The hard problem of consciousness is unsolvable IMHO by science, as it is entirely subjective; in fact, it is the fact of existence of subjective experience. The problem is this: even if you find some objective mechanism that generates consciousness, how would you make the explanatory leap from the objective mechanism to the subjective? Even if you say: "Oh, we flipped this switch and now this person is unconscious." - this is a description from the outside. You cannot claim by this that the person's consciousness has disappeared. Maybe not connected to the contents of the human mind anymore; but the gulf between objective and subjective can never be crossed by objective science. If I had a dollar for every time someone claimed that the hard problem of consciousness isn't actually hard, I would be very rich.
  - FrustratedMonky 4y ago
    I think people have confused the matter by splitting into soft/hard. There is only 1 consciousness. Soft is describing how it can be done physically, how to build it, or explain it, and hard is what it is like to experience it from the inside. By creating the hard problem, it really just says "we can't know anything about any internal state". All "internal subject states" are self reported, and a machine can just as well self report enough to mimic a human. So at that point, we can't prove that the machine doesn't have a 'subjective' internal state. By this line of reasoning, we can't prove that any humans are conscious either. Any lines of logic that try to prove the hard problem, would either both prove that the machine and human are both conscious, or prove that neither are conscious.
    - theobromananda 4y ago
      Sorry, you are part of the 90% confusing the hard and soft problem without understanding what is hard about the hard problem. In fact, merely realizing the hard problem of consciousness is one of the first stages that is reached in modern vipassana meditation. The hard problem is not stating "we can't know anything about any internal state", it is about the mere subjective existence of the internal state and not about the contents of internal experience or any objective fact about that internal state. I don't know why this is seems often so hard, but in consciousness research and meditators' language (or in my native language at least), most of this seems pretty well-definded. It has no relation to proving that humans or machines are conscious. It is about no objective fact at all, and thus cannot be investigated using objective methods. That is why it is unsolvable by objective science. To use a koan-like: It is about this.
naasking 4y ago
> It is perhaps the only thing that is true about that universe, that I somehow exists. Everything else is simply derived from that and might as well be an illusion (perhaps a very consistent and steady illusion). Actually, there is every indication that you are an illusion.

elevaet 4y ago

> We go about our days for weeks, months, years and even decades without even noticing that consciousness is a thing. Do we? I feel like I'm constantly reflecting on it and trying to make sense of it, and that I'm certainly not alone. I'd like to think that it's part of being human to turn the lens back on itself and wonder "what am I?" But I suppose some people could care less for navel gazing.

FrustratedMonky 4y ago

This is a common view, but it is based on humans thinking they are special. “My own thoughts are so amazing”, “my own subjective reality is so real to me”, thus surely this is unexplainable. When really, humans give themselves (their own thoughts) way too much credit and most are barely aware of their own thoughts, barely self-aware at all. It is easy to say something is ‘un-explainable’ and thus ‘must be in some otherworldly realm that is beyond comprehension’, if one is not able to observer the problem. Most humans aren’t self-aware enough to know their own thoughts or examine where those thoughts come from. Just a few decades ago simple voice recognition was deemed ‘a totally human ability that the computer will never accomplish’, now it is ordinary. It comes down to humans internal subjective reality is both amazing and ‘unknowable to the outside’, ’un-observable’, thus un-testable. But then we make this giant leap that nothing we will ever build will also have some ‘internal subjective reality’. It keeps coming up that GPT is a glorified auto-complete, but then never explain how a human isn’t also just an ‘auto-complete’ machine, just going through the day twitching at stimuli. Why do we think a human doing copy/paste, and regurgitating something they heard, is special, but if a computer does then suddenly it is completely invalid to think they could ever be conscious.

theobromananda 4y ago
What you are referring to is the soft problem of consciousness, the contents of consciousness. You are probably right that the contents of human consciousness, or qualia, can be approximated by our understanding and technology to a very high degree given enough time. However, OP was referring to the hard problem of consciousness. The hard problem of consciousness is unsolvable IMHO by science, as it is entirely subjective; in fact, it is the fact of existence of subjective experience. The problem is this: even if you find some objective mechanism that generates consciousness, how would you make the explanatory leap from the objective mechanism to the subjective? Even if you say: "Oh, we flipped this switch and now this person is unconscious." - this is a description from the outside. You cannot claim by this that the person's consciousness has disappeared. Maybe not connected to the contents of the human mind anymore; but the gulf between objective and subjective can never be crossed by objective science. If I had a dollar for every time someone claimed that the hard problem of consciousness isn't actually hard, I would be very rich.
- FrustratedMonky 4y ago
  I think people have confused the matter by splitting into soft/hard. There is only 1 consciousness. Soft is describing how it can be done physically, how to build it, or explain it, and hard is what it is like to experience it from the inside. By creating the hard problem, it really just says "we can't know anything about any internal state". All "internal subject states" are self reported, and a machine can just as well self report enough to mimic a human. So at that point, we can't prove that the machine doesn't have a 'subjective' internal state. By this line of reasoning, we can't prove that any humans are conscious either. Any lines of logic that try to prove the hard problem, would either both prove that the machine and human are both conscious, or prove that neither are conscious.
  - theobromananda 4y ago
    Sorry, you are part of the 90% confusing the hard and soft problem without understanding what is hard about the hard problem. In fact, merely realizing the hard problem of consciousness is one of the first stages that is reached in modern vipassana meditation. The hard problem is not stating "we can't know anything about any internal state", it is about the mere subjective existence of the internal state and not about the contents of internal experience or any objective fact about that internal state. I don't know why this is seems often so hard, but in consciousness research and meditators' language (or in my native language at least), most of this seems pretty well-definded. It has no relation to proving that humans or machines are conscious. It is about no objective fact at all, and thus cannot be investigated using objective methods. That is why it is unsolvable by objective science. To use a koan-like: It is about this.

naasking 4y ago

> It is perhaps the only thing that is true about that universe, that I somehow exists. Everything else is simply derived from that and might as well be an illusion (perhaps a very consistent and steady illusion). Actually, there is every indication that you are an illusion.