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What is the nature of consciousness?
- Slava_Propanei 3y ago[dead]
- torcete 3y agoI have been very interested in this topic recently and the Buddhist teachings about source of consciousness. They are really interesting, but with some dark corners that are not clear enough to me. For example, what would it be the source of intelligence? and how does it relate to consciousness?
- lynx23 3y agoI suggest asking your local monk, I am sure they have a pleasantly sounding explanation for you.
- jdenning 3y agoThat’s kind of dismissive. Just because something is “religion” doesn’t mean that it has nothing to say on the subject. In my experience, a lot of Indian “religious” texts have some pretty interesting philosophy above and beyond the dogma one might expect from religion. Eg, the Vedas talk a lot about perception and how it influences our experience in the world.
- lynx23 3y agoThanks ChatGPT for correcting my speech. But, I kind of wonder, what is wrong about this suggestion? Do you consider suggesting to ask the experts in a particular field as dismissive? Do you think asking the general public about a very specific culturally loaded topic is better then refering to the experts?
- jdenning 3y agoUgh, I just realized that accusing people who disagree with you of being ChatGPT is going to be a thing now. The dismissive part was the "pleasantly sounding" bit. If you want to continue the discussion in good faith, I'm game, but nothing you have written so far indicates to me that you are operating in good faith.
- lynx23 3y agoTo me, religious explanations always have an air of cozyness, because "reality" of human experience is usually much more harsh then people are prepared to accept. Case in point: "an act of god" vs "the universe doesn't care about you in particular". In any case, I realize I was a bit too cynical for a fruitful exchange, my bad.
- jdenning 3y agoThat's fair - but I think that the cozyness you're referring to is more a product of someone building their entire world view off of a core "truth" that cannot be undermined. That kind of thing is pretty common among religious people (Edit: I think that a lot of modern materialists have the same problem); however, if you're willing to engage with non-empirical philosophy in general, there's a lot of interesting stuff in texts that you might otherwise dismiss as religious dogma. Not the stuff that is promoted by organized churches/gurus/etc for consumption by their followers, but writings from people who seem to have been genuinely trying to figure out WTF this whole existence thing is about. In my experience, a lot of Vedic/Hindu and Buddhist writings are in this genre (at least they are no worse than modern, western philosophy in this regard). A lot of very deep thinkers from the ancient world have been relegated to the pile of "religion", but if you give them a shot, you might find something interesting. If you engage with practically any text written more than a thousand years ago, you'll find things that seem silly from a modern perspective, but if you grant them some leeway re: how their cultural context influenced their thought, there are some real gems. (Edit: as a relevant example from Buddhism, check out the Diamond Sutra)
- jdenning 3y ago
- torcete 3y agoI might actually do that. I would love to have a conversation with one.
- jdenning 3y agoI think from the Buddhist perspective, “desire” (I think “un-satisfactoryness” is a bit more accurate) is the prime mover
- taopai 3y agoAn important component to intelligence is self regulation. If anxiety or fear sizes you your cognition gets severely impaired. You can see this in professionals. My uncle is a remarkable lawyer. He was responsible for very important clients and has steel nerves but he is unable to do math. I know he is very intelligent in general but his emotions doesn't let him learn math. Since he was a child he associated maths with high anxiety because his father was an engineer who got angry and frustrated when he tried to push maths to his son. But in general sense I think the abstract concept intelligence doesn't matter. The only thing that matters is what you do, not your potential.
- torcete 3y agoYour comment diverges from what I actually meant, but it's actually very interesting. I believe that part of the process of maturing is to master your emotions. Don't repress them but acknowledge them. They are there, but you don't need to let them lead your live. I think lots of people suffer from emotional traumas like your uncle's, me being one of them. And a lot of people are no even aware of them. Introspection is actually not that easy.
- indigoabstract 3y agoOne example that comes to mind on what I see as a key difference between the two: Let us consider, say, ants and bears, they're obviously intelligent and reasonably well adapted to their environment (especially ants). If they could somehow consciously realize that they exist both as an individual and as a species and would feel threatened by some common enemy, maybe humans, they could then band together as a species against the common foe. If that happened, they would cause way more trouble that they usually do. Luckily for us, these types of thoughts never enter their minds. Even if a bear goes rogue and starts attacking people, they never reach a point where they band together and go on a crime spree or decide to take over the world. Somehow, we are able to imagine those possibilities, but they cannot and it isn't because they aren't intelligent enough. Something else is missing. In other words, if the animals had the minds of humans, we can only imagine what the world would come to. Probably an us vs them death-match.
- jemmyw 3y agoThat doesn't mean that those animals aren't conscious though. It just means it's a scale. And while we're at the top of the scale, we might have accelerated away from the previous rung by social, rather than biological, means. Studies with animals have shown than we can build on their base intelligence with specific interactions. I'm not sure your scenario would play out. If animals always had our level then it would just be a different world. If they suddenly acquired it then I'm guessing, just as with humans, some would fight, many would ingratiate and look at how to become entwined with us. Livestock might trample the farmer but them hooves aren't going against human weapons. It's a silly thought, but I think if what you say were true then given planetary resources and environmental concerns most of the humans should be rising up against those of us exploiting then and living the good life.
- indigoabstract 3y agoWell, it was just a thought experiment, since we have no way to find out. Yes, animals can learn many skills and also find surprising solutions to reach and open that food recipient you thought was safely locked, but there also seems to be a fuzzy limit to the thoughts available to them and it's plausible that, even given a human like level of intelligence, an average intelligent talking dog might be content to live its life in a human household with other dogs, while an average intelligent talking wolf might not. We don't know where feelings and desires come from, why somebody has a burning desire to be free or do some particular thing, while somebody else can be satisfied without freedom if their basic needs are met. Many people are preoccupied with AI these days, and most seem to consider consciousness as something that emerges from intelligence on a gradient, if they ever think about it. To me, consciousness looks more like something complementary to intelligence. In principle, wouldn't it be possible for an artificial system to be intelligent and react to its environment without having any feeling or experience about it, just by being trained to successfully respond to its survival challenges and perhaps be able to repair or construct copies of itself? Is there a survival advantage in being able to experience life? Doesn't it just needlessly complicate things? For some unknown reason, I find myself wondering about this from time to time.
- lynx23 3y agoLooks like a lot of chattering and nothing new. Please correct me if I missed something.
- svs 3y agoChildish Western philosophers. Not a single mention of Indian metaphysics which has deeply studied this problem. Not to be taken seriously.
- ChiefOBrien 3y agoHow about contributing with an example of those groundbreaking Indian metaphysics studies instead of denigrating everyone with insults?
- shri_krishna 3y agoThere isn't "one Indian metaphysics" but many schools (with 3 of them being the most prominent - Advaita, Vishishtadvaita and Dvaita) called the Vedanta schools. These schools deal with answering fundamental questions: 1. Who am I? What is I? Is the concept of "I" an Illusion or is it Real? 2. What is Consciousness and its nature? 3. What is Karma? 4. Is there a God? 5. If there is a God, then what is the relationship between God and I? Am I different from God or the same as God? 6. What is Creation? Is it an Illusion or is it Real? How big is it? What are the various planes of existence (also called Lokas)? 7. What is the relationship between God and Creation? Is it dependent, independent or one with God? 8. What is the relationship between Creation and I? 9. What is the ultimate purpose of existence? Is there a life beyond this life? 10. What is Time? Is it Relativistic or Absolute? What is the Age of Creation? Is Creation cyclical or is it linear? How does Karma tie into this? 11. What is considered Pramana (Proof) for arriving at an answer for these fundamental questions? > an example of those groundbreaking Indian metaphysics studies It is hard to point to one because Indian metaphysics is vast. But for me, the most groundbreaking Indian metaphysics study is in coming up with a value for the Age of the Creation by dividing Time into Yuga cycles. To quote Carl Sagan "The Hindu religion is the only one of the world’s great faiths dedicated to the idea that the Cosmos itself undergoes an immense, indeed an infinite, number of deaths and rebirths. It is the only religion in which the time scales correspond to those of modern scientific cosmology. Its cycles run from our ordinary day and night to a day and night of Brahma, 8.64 billion years long. Longer than the age of the Earth or the Sun and about half the time since the Big Bang.". Even though he got the part about Creation undergoing continuous Creation and Destruction right, the figure he quoted was wrong. The Multiverse, as per Sanatan Dharma, has a lifespan of 311.04 trillion years with our Universe being a really, really tiny portion of it (also called Brahmanda. There are infinite Brahmandas in the Creation and the Creation itself is divided into 14 planes of existence / parallel universes called Lokas). The day and night of Brahma, as per Sanatan Dharma, does not constitute the length of the Cosmos. So 8.64 billion years is definitely the Time duration of a day and night of Brahma but it does not equate to Age of the Creation. The Age of the Creation = 100 Brahma Years = 311.04 trillion human years. And yes we are talking relativistic Time here. Coming to relativistic Time, I really like how such concepts are so well explained through stories in Dharmic scriptures. One of those is about a King named Kakudmi who took his daughter Revati to visit Brahma Loka (another plane of existence / parallel Universe) which is the residence of Lord Brahma (the deity incharge of Creation in Sanatan Dharma). He felt there was no one worthy of her intellect and beauty on Earth and wanted to consult with Brahma to get her a suitable husband. He nevertheless took with him a shortlist of candidates which he reluctantly prepared to be presented to Brahma. One arrival in Brahma Loka, Brahma was engaged in listening to musical performances by the Gandharvas (artists in the Dharmic lore). Kakudmi bowed and waited patiently. Once the performance was over, he approached Brahma with his problem and list of suitable candidates. Brahma laughed loudly and explained to Kakudmi that Time runs differently in different planes of existence and that in the short time they had to wait in Brahma Loka to see him, 27 Chaturyugas had elapsed on Earth. 27 Chaturyugas. Each Yuga cycle = 4,320,000 human years. So 27 Chaturyugas = 116,640,000 human years. “O King, all those whom you may have decided within the core of your heart to accept as your son-in-law have died in the course of time. Twenty-seven catur-yugas have already passed. Those upon whom you may have already decided are now gone, and so are their sons, grandsons and other descendants. You cannot even hear about their names. You must therefore bestow your daughter upon some other husband, for you are now alone, and your friends, your ministers, servants, wives, kinsmen, armies, and treasures, have long since been swept away by the hand of Time.” Brahma then comforts King Kakudmi and prophesizes that by the time he reaches Earth, God would incarnate and with him would incarnate various Devatas (demigods) and one of them, by the name of "Balarama", would become her husband.
- lacasito25 3y ago> Like materialism — the view that I sort of work with, the idea that consciousness is a natural phenomenon and is somehow a property of material things like brains and bodies. That itself is probably not testable So, then, you "believe" in materialism, even thought you cannot prove it. There's a more obvious theory than materialism: everything is consciousness. You create material things, they do not exist outside of you.
- jmole 3y agoWhat is the difference between “everything is consciousness” and solipsism?
- perfmode 3y agosolipsism is a sort of self centeredness while consciousness lacks a center and lacks a self
- rad88 3y agoThat hardly strikes me as more obvious, to say the least. But then again perhaps no thing has ever struck me at all.
- tsimionescu 3y agoIt's, like, all in our heads, man! But to add a little more substance - your theory is something we all learn is probably false at around two-three weeks after birth if I remember correctly. Somewhere around that time we discover object permanence, and start understanding that the rest of the world keeps existing even when we're not aware of it: it's all a real thing, not a product of our consciousness. It's especially strange to put consciousness in charge of creating the whole world when it isn't even involved in half the stuff happening in our own bodies.
- perfmode 3y agohave you ever experienced anything outside of your conscious experience? how do you know there is a world outside? and not phenomena arising within your conscious experience? if you close your eyes, you will find a consciousness without end open your eyes & these very words arise within your conscious experience and when you close your eyes, only consciousness remains
- jboulanger2 3y agoA lot of words to basically say: "we don't really understand it". Personally I don't believe the human brain / science will ever be able to "understand" / "explain" consciousness. What would "understand" / "explain" even mean in that context?
- wayoverthecloud 3y agoRight. And what will understanding consciousness even accomplish? I don't think we are really interested in consciousness but in happiness; consciousness is just a fancy term for thing we cannot ever explain. 5 minutes of silence/meditation everyday will teach you more about consciousness then all articles you will ever read.
- namaria 3y agoHappiness exists only in opposition to sadness. Seeking the relative will make you go around in circles. I think what we really ought to be interested in is letting go of all things relative and realizing our need for them is time bound. Eternity lies ahead of us, and behind.
- nine_k 3y ago- Link to other, more rigorously defined concepts. - Make practically applicable conclusions based o that, which were not obvious before.
- perfmode 3y agoconsciousness may not be something to understand but rather to discover through direct experience
- kukkeliskuu 3y agoMany of us share the experience that we have been driving for an hour, and end up safely at home, but do not remember anything about it. So we can fully operate in some kind of wakeful "sleep" state. This tells us that "consciousness" is not constant, but fluctuates, and above certain threshold we can remember what happened. Unless we specifically observe this phenomena while it happens, we will reconstruct a "memory" of being conscious. According to some meditation traditions, it is possible to learn to slowly increase the consciousness, mainly by learning to stop leaking out attention. Attention is the key to the consciousness.
- martin-adams 3y agoWhat this makes me think is that consciousness is the non-autonomous part of our experience. I now wonder if we are in a ‘learning mode’ when we’re having a conscious experience.
- NoMoreNicksLeft 3y agoIf there is such a thing as consciousness (a big if), then why would it disappear on the long drive home? Just because you've tasked some lesser software routine with the responsibility of not turning you into road pizza doesn't mean you're functionally unconscious? I've heard this described before, and those people are daydreaming. Or chewing on a particular problem they couldn't crack in the work day. Or hell, some of them seem to "listen to music" in their head. The trouble with "consciousness" is that humans can't really define it in a meaningful way, but they're absolutely certain that it's a real thing and it makes them important.
- GoblinSlayer 3y ago>then why would it disappear on the long drive home? Thinking is expensive, so it's optimized with reflexes.
- namaria 3y agoMaybe we could define consciousness as a threshold of attention. Maybe some complex systems exhibit what we call consciousness when it can muster enough attention to become reflexive.
- delta_p_delta_x 3y agoSeth's belief in a materialistic[1] explanation for consciousness and the human condition is something I subscribe to, too. My view is that we are simply very complex, giant state machines built on top of ever-smaller state machines; all our thoughts, perceptions, and individual realities are the product of neuron connections in our CNS, and the various inputs to it throughout our lives. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Materialism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Materialism
- perfmode 3y agohow can we ever know if matter exists beyond the conscious experience of it?
- GoblinSlayer 3y agoIsn't that merely agnosticism?
- namaria 3y agoNo, that's physics. Last year the Nobel prize was awarded for work providing evidence for the fundamental non-locality of the universe. Objective materialism seems more and more untenable on the face of hard evidence.
- GoblinSlayer 3y agoThat work didn't demonstrate nonlocality, it debunked hidden variables theory.
- namaria 3y agoYou're right, I went on a news article full of misconceptions. Thank you for pointing it out.
- anon84873628 3y agoThe secular version of it, yeah. I believe the more academic framing is called epistemic constructivism or idealism or something.
- photochemsyn 3y agoCan you have consciousness without symbolic references to emotional states? "I am hungry, I am thirsty, my battery pack needs recharging or I will die soon.." It's true that wild animals communicate their internal states to others via various cues and this goes up and down the whole complexity spectrum, from ants signalling distress due to attack by other ants, up to humans sending messages to other humans in times of war... but 'consciousness' seems to imply the ability to constuct a symbolic line of communication in fairly great detail. Here's a definition of conscious communication, perhaps at the early limit: "Here is a seed, that I took from a fruit. If you plant this seed, it will grow into a tree, from which you can harvest more fruit." As far as I know, only humans have figured out how to transmit that degree of informatoin to others of their species, right? So we define something like that as a (fairly arbitrary) definition of 'consciousness'.
- perfmode 3y agoallow the mind to come to rest consciousness is prior to mental activity
- photochemsyn 3y agoBy this definition, ants, trees, and mountains are conscious. A valid viewpoint, although hard to explain to people who think humans are somehow fundamentally different from chimpanzees. Now, I don't think chimpanzees have ever been shown to engage in conscious agriculture, have they? Learning to start fires, is a debatable question.
- gpvos 3y agoAgriculture came pretty late in human development too. You sure we were unconscious before that, or even before language? Conscious - and intelligent - tool use has been observed at least in crows and apes.
- gpvos 3y agoI would classify your last example as intelligence, not consciousness. I think most people would agree that most animals, at the very least many mammals, have some form of consciousness. It may even be that our consciousness doesn't differ qualitatively from theirs, and the only difference is the level of intelligence.
- wayoverthecloud 3y agoI don't know why we deny that there are things we cannot simply solve/explain. I think it's because the thinking mind always is made to solve and explain problems. And the final problem to solve is "what is it that thinks and even exists". The thinking mind won't be able to answer this because consciousness and the true nature is prior to thinking. You need to be silent and witness your mind's content to have an understanding. Also, we are not really interested in consciousness, we are interested in permanent happiness. With enough meditation everything is really apparent but through words it's just an endless loop of questioning that leads to nowhere.
- nathias 3y agoit's just gamma oscillations syncing the spatially distinct neural populations
- EMM_386 3y agoMy biggest question has always been, and probably always will be, how non-sentient matter can become sentient. Now, I'll have to set aside things like panpsychism for now. We'll have to assume that individual atoms are non conscious. Clearly consciousness is not a binary on/off type thing, it's a sliding scale. If individual atoms are 0.0000001% conscious, then that changes everything. Assuming they are not, what is it about gathering these non-sentient atoms together that suddenly gives rise to self-awareness? If I gave you 2 billion atoms and told you to make them self-aware, what could you do? Is it the structure of the atoms? Is it the intercommunication of the parts of the brain? Is it the information density? Is it the resulting electrical activity that we can measure as brain waves? Clearly, we can hook up an EEG to a patient and determine whether they are conscious or not. The brain is still there. The atoms are still there. They are still in the same structure. But the consciousness is gone. I have been diving deep into this recently due to the rapid pace of AI development. We need to understand what causes this to happen, to determine if it can happen in machines. I don't really see a reason it can't, depending on which theory you go with. If you read about the integrated information theory of consciousness, that leaves the door wide open for machines / AI systems to become conscious, if they haven't already. If this has anything to do with information density, then AI will rapidly become "more concious" than humans. But it will still lack qualia. The pain of a headache, the smell of a rose, the redness of a sunset. I am not sure what type of consciousoness that AI would even have. The subjective experience would be vastly unfamiliar to anything we understand. Ok, I've gone on long enough about this. I'm already too confused as it is. Maybe we're not meant to know.
- Jedd 3y ago> Clearly consciousness is not a binary on/off type thing ... Go back a second. Can you explain why that's clear? It may help to address some of your subsequent lines of questioning.
- EMM_386 3y agoIt's not as if one additional atom added to a structure turns it from "unconscious" to "conscious". There must be a sliding scale, where at some point, somehow, these structures exhibit tiny bits of consciousness. Think a patient under general anesthesia who is woken up ever so slightly. As the systems become more complex, they become "more conscious". This would be similar to you being extremely groggy versus awake and fully alert. That's what I mean by not binary on/off. There is no sudden switch that gets flipped and then, bang, self-aware being.
- 4gotunameagain 3y ago> Our brains create color from mixtures of colorless electromagnetic radiation. And in the case of color, I think it’s really a powerful example. Because in a sense, what we experience is less than what’s there. Because we only detect a tiny slice of the energy in the electromagnetic spectrum, a very thin slice of reality — three wavelengths, more or less, for most of us. But out of those three wavelengths, we generate an almost infinite palette of rich colors. So what we experience in color is both less than and more than what’s really there. This is not entirely accurate, as the spectral sensitivity of human cone cells is not a dirac delta function or a small rect, but rather spreads across a relatively large part of the (visual) spectrum, even overlapping. If it weren't the case, monochromatic radiation that fell outside those three peak wavelengths could not be perceived (e.g. low pressure sodium lamps)
- 2-718-281-828 3y agoExcellent point. It's details like that which make me question how serious you can take this interview.
- 2-718-281-828 3y ago> You lose [consciousness] when you’re under general anesthesia or in dreamless sleep. How does he know that? Seems like a petty thing to argue about. But musing about consciousness is so subtle and evasive that you really have to be careful about how you think about it. And this seems like sloppy reasoning to me. Of course you could introduce that as an axiom. But then you still have to either strictly stay in a philosophical domain or you have to map this axiom to something you can measure and identify in reality. And I don't think you can look at an MRI or sth like that and say - see this is the specific measurement I interpret as "not being conscious". I firmly believe there is no point in even trying to figure out consciousness without having significant experience in zen meditation.
- dusted 3y ago> It doesn’t feel like anything to be a table or a chair. That, we don't know. It's based on assumptions, such that some biological processes must go on, because. _obviously_ if they don't, there can't be this consciousness thing (that we don't know what is) going on.. It's an interesting flaw, we know we have this huge gab in our understanding of the subject, yet we have an intimate relationship with the very same phenomenon, and it might be that duality which tricks us into such assumptions as "It doesn’t feel like anything to be a table".. We can't ask a table if it feels anything, we can't induce in it, any of the measurable responses that we get when interacting with a person, for instance, and so we assume, that since we cannot observe it, this thing that we don't know what is, is not present. Until not that long ago, it was assumed that infants didn't feel pain, that animals didn't feel pain.. Now we seem to have concluded, that since they have the biological gear for it, they do in fact feel pain.. However, we strictly speaking haven't proven that the biological gear that allows us to produce measurable responses, is actually instrumental in giving rise to consciousness, rather than simply allowing expression of it.