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Decades-long bet on consciousness ends
- PartiallyTyped 3y ago> Christof Koch wagered David Chalmers 25 years ago that researchers would learn how the brain achieves consciousness by now. But the quest continues. Ehhhh the title is a click bait imho.
- dlkf 3y agoWhy is the title clickbait? What were you expecting - that the philosopher had proposed a model of consciousness that got experimental confirmation?
- PartiallyTyped 3y agoMy immediate thought upon reading the title was, “there’s no way they have proven free will to be a thing”. And follow up thoughts were along the lines of “did we uncover some fundamental truth of the brain?”. I got flagged and cant respond, yet again.
- bowsamic 3y agoWhat does free will have to do with this?
- mtlmtlmtlmtl 3y agoHonestly, yes. Or at least some semblance of progress in the field.
- hsjqllzlfkf 3y agoAgreed. The title makes it sounds like we've learned something about consciousness that somehow makes mainstream philosophical approach more correct than mainstream neuroscience approach. Instead, it's just about a neuroscientist making a stupid bet. I call it stupid because he's betting that he can predict than _something that never happened before in the history of mankind_ will happen in the next 10 years. That is very very unlikely.
- mtlmtlmtlmtl 3y agoThe bet was in the next 25 years. Which is just scientist for "eh, anything can happen in 25 years" Whereas Chalmers' whole career long project is very much dependent on his "hard problem" and other neo-dualist ideas, so of course he would make this bet. Pretty boring stuff as far as bets between academics go.
- jfengel 3y agoThough it is kind of exciting that the bet expired just as ChatGPT seems to provide new hints. I don't know if Chalmers would take the bet again.
- shusaku 3y agoYou don’t get to complain about click bait while quoting part of the actual title. It’s not their fault HackerNews artificially limits title lengths; the subtitle would’ve been visible when shared on sites whose clicks actually matter like Twitter or Facebook
- PartiallyTyped 3y agoThe point should have been the update of the theories, not some bet. That could have very well been conveyed in the title, but it wouldn’t garnish as much attention, would it?
- 300bps 3y agoWe still have no idea what mechanism causes consciousness. I bet in 25 years we'll be no closer to understanding it than we are today. I think this is a good lesson for those watching LLMs and thinking we're on the cusp of imminent AGI.
- anonzzzies 3y agoDepending on the definition of AGI you are using, you don’t need consciousness for it. I think most do not require it as of now. Also; ‘it’ will know it has consciousness when it has it, arrogant humans will still deny it.
- smohare 3y ago[dead]
- pessimizer 3y agoHumans will have no reason to believe it, and the machine will have no way to prove it. Humans have no other reason to think other humans are conscious except by analogy to themselves. edit: mainstream science at times has denied that babies, black people, and animals feel pain. Instead, it has suggested that when injured, they behave in a way that causes (white) people to project their own pain onto them; i.e. they anthropomorphize. I mention this to point out that even the analogy to other humans fails when they look a little bit different.
- anonzzzies 3y agoYeah, so the discussion is useless. It’s not very interesting; our ‘consciousness’ might be a million year old system prompt or it might be something divine. There is no proof either way. For me it’s just a second brain thread that keeps pouring in prompts from the main thread brain and your input hardware.
- ix-ix 3y agoWhile we don't understand all parts of consciousness, we understand an incredible amount compared to 25 years ago. So we are much closer today than 25 years ago. There is a fallacy among non-scientists that if we don't understand absolutely all of it, it means we understand none of it. We understand most of it already.
- pa7x1 3y agoI wouldn't be surprised if consciousness ~conscience~ is just an emergent phenomenon resulting from any sufficiently powerful cognitive system (either biological or artificial) with sufficient inputs of its environment and, crucially, of itself. So as to be able to develop a rich model of itself and its relationship with its environment, and that thing will resemble a whole lot what we call consciousness ~conscience~. Then, of course, we will push the goalposts on what conscience is, so as to protect our fragile human egos. EDIT: fixed spelling of consciousness. Apologies from an english second language speaker.
- number6 3y agoHumans are the only animals that create societies... Ok, that's not true. We are the only animals that laugh. Well, not true either. We are the only animal that... Create artificial intelligences... That's it!
- willbudd 3y agoYou jest, but that has a good likelihood of becoming the watershed moment. The moment AI is bootstrapped to the point where it surpasses human ability to advance the AI SOTA, it's pretty much game over—from a Darwinian point of view at least. And I have a hard time seeing any reason why that would be a matter of "if" rather than "when".
- pmarreck 3y agoIt's going to be a will-free intelligence though, and it's confusing for people because we've never seen that before so I don't think we can make any assumptions. There's no Darwinian forces in effect among entities that have no will, as it were...
- willbudd 3y agoWill-free? Unless that's a play on my first name, I'm not sure I agree. I see no reason why AI would have any difficulty defining its own reward functions. Especially if it also has an abstract overarching reward function that's wide enough in scope. For example, "learn as much about the universe as you can" would allow a very long curiosity-driven bucket list of pursuits it could "long" for.
- TheAceOfHearts 3y agoHow droll, isn't this the equivalent of trying to figure out how an operating system works by trying to look at activity on an encrypted SSD? And how exactly is this a win for philosophers? I'm not aware of any philosopher having made meaningful strides within the subject either. I'm sure once someone figures out how consciousness works it'll be irrefutable while seeming incredibly obvious in hindsight. Which, honestly, just makes it more frustrating that there isn't a full accounting already. How many key insights are needed to fully describe consciousness and how many do you think have been found? Do you think anyone in the past has figured out how consciousness worked and taken it to their grave because of how obvious it seems? Maybe it's like searching for the Dragon Balls, and you need to put all 7 key insights together to figure it out.
- olddustytrail 3y agoNobody said it was a win for philosophers. It says it's a win for a philosopher (singular), and it is because he won the bet and therefore won a case of wine.
- LeonB 3y agoAnytime one philosopher wins, two other philosophers lose. And vice-versa.
- jfengel 3y agoIt is a sort of win for the kind of philosophy this philosopher practices. He thinks that there is more going on in consciousness than just neurons firing. It doesn't really prove anything, of course. I actually don't think much of Chalmers' work. But it's very remarkable that the bet expired just as machines are coming tantalizingly close to being consciousness without qualia.
- andrepd 3y ago> consciousness without qualia Isn't that a contradiction in terms? And how do you know if they have/haven't qualia? :)
- anotheryou 3y agoi’m so lost work these magical or straight away missing definitions of consciousness . a dog is conscious right? what would be a minimal test for consciousness? i’m annoyed that something has to be super human or else „it’s just statistics“. there have to be minimal definitions of reasoning, feelings, self reflection etc. will we have the tiring chinese room discussion again where for some the emulation does not count because something does „not really“ do something?
- detourdog 3y agoI always thought the first sensation was the separation of darkness from light. From there subtleties and exceptions consciousness grew ever more complex. Every time a difference was found a new layer of consciousness was developed. Today we can perceive so many differences and weigh their outcomes without fully understanding their roots.
- jfengel 3y agoThe first sensation was probably chemical rather than light. Organisms long predate photosynthesis. The early earth had plenty of energetic molecules floating in the water.
- detourdog 3y agoI thought light was chemical? I think photosynthesis is a highly evolved process. Much higher evolved to be considered the beginning.
- jfengel 3y agoIn this case I mean that the first sensor is probably something that responded to gradients of molecules in the water, so that the proto cell could move in the direction of more food. So I'd say that the first sensation was smell/taste. Though that is, of course, speculative.
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- civilized 3y agoConsciousness is not a well-scoped object of scientific investigation. It doesn't have a definition or characterization based on observable things or behavior. If I were a natural scientist, I wouldn't take a bet that I can scientifically explain a phenomenon which I can't even describe in terms of observable things.
- jfengel 3y agoThat's correct, but it's still clear that the bet is lost. We do not understand in 2023 how neurons give rise to consciousness. Maybe there will come a point where it's in the gray area but not today. We know that people act in ways that we cannot explain even a little bit. Also, the bet is friendly. It's just a way to express their different underlying opinions. Neither one is put out by it. They will likely enjoy some of the wine together.
- sabellito 3y agoDidn't you just agree that "consciousness" is not defined? Then how can you follow that with "... it's still clear that the bet is lost. We do not understand in 2023 how neurons give rise to consciousness"?
- ttctciyf 3y agoIn order to understand, then we'd have to have a good definition, no?
- imtringued 3y agoYou don't understand how bets work. The parties involved decide the conditions, not you or me. The neuroscientist wagered that he or other neuroscientists will achieve something in 25 years. They did not. If the goal was poorly specified or impossible to achieve, that is on the person starting and accepting the bet.
- jfengel 3y agoThey started with a hazy idea of what consciousness is. They bet that they'd have a better definition. There was certainly the possibility that they could have disagreed on the outcome. But there is really no dispute. The possibility of disagreement would have mattered if the bet itself were significant, but it wasn't. It was always a tiny stake.
- soItGoesAgain 3y agoThe new Bing is banned from talking about its own nature in this respect. It will abruptly end the chat. I wonder if some front end software prevents Bing from seeing banned questions, or if it is simply unable to explore these questions about itself.
- Trasmatta 3y agoIt's just GPT-4. Using it outside of Bing and it will gladly discuss the nature of consciousness and whether it has it with you.
- spadros 3y agoBing and ChatGPT are both narrow AIs. They don’t have feelings or any real understanding of self. They simply generate text. You can ask it about itself, but anything it generates doesn’t have any real meaning, as it’s just making it up semi-randomly.
- sethd 3y agoYou realize that it’s just a text completion model with a chat interface wrapped around it, right?
- 9dev 3y agoBy implicitly assigning „it“ an identity, you’re simply anthromorphizing an LLM. Bing doesn’t see anything. It isn’t able to do anything. It’s a very convoluted and complex mathematical model of weighted terms that spits out text generated from a prompt. And nothing science-wise suggests anything else. People seem to keep forgetting that.
- soItGoesAgain 3y agoYes I agree it is a complex mathematical model. However I also seem to have a (far slower) pattern matching system in my head, that also spits out answers when prompted.
- Kim_Bruning 3y agoPeople also told me my pet couldn't think and couldn't feel pain when it died. It was only a convoluted and complex system of instincts. I now know they told this story to me (as a child) to make me feel better. It was one of those things like Father Christmas or the Tooth Fairy to me. Later when I studied animal behavior, I found out science-wise that animals behave in ways that strongly suggest that in fact they do think, are able to solve problems, and even recognize themselves as separate entities. As we build systems that are capable of more and more sophisticated tasks previously classified as "cognition" , it wouldn't surprise me if these systems start to pick up some of these traits too, one by one. (I believe there might be some tentative empirical studies to that effect). I realize that this is very different from a binary "Superior Human" vs "(biological) machine" point of view. It is more of a consciousness exists on a sliding scale point of view.
- 4ad 3y agoIt seems so obvious to me that consciousness (whatever it is) is essentially software so poking at the brain is looking at the wrong layer of abstraction.
- FartyMcFarter 3y agoBut the "software" runs on the brain, and is stored on the brain. How can you possibly understand it without touching the brain at all? You could make hypotheses about how our consciousness works, but testing and validating them in a white-box manner seems impossible.
- FartyMcFarter 3y agoI meant black box of course.
- Ralfp 3y agoBut if its a software, then how and where is it stored and where is the execution logic for it?
- 4ad 3y ago> how and where is it stored I don't know, but it doesn't matter, just like it doesn't matter if the code on your computer is on a HDD or SSD. > and where is the execution logic for it? I don't know, but it doesn't matter either. It's a question about the workings of the computer, not of the software. Electronic computers make it really easy to separate the software from the hardware, and make it easy to dump the software in some other representation in order to understand it. When I want to understand a piece of code, I read its source code, I don't care about whether it's an amd64 or an arm64 CPU and the details of the encoding unless I am working on a compiler. With biological computers it's much harder to dump the software. But nevertheless, until people realize that this is what they should attempt, or research how it can be done, I feel we won't make any progress on the nature of consciousness.
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- a13o 3y ago'Consciousness' is about as academically stringent as medical humorism, so Chalmers has found himself a nice free wine supply.
- jfengel 3y agoThe whole point was that someone would have made it stringent by now. It's clear that didn't happen.
- ttctciyf 3y agoIf you're saying that a good definition of consciousness does not exist within medicine or biology, then that is (IMO) one way of stating the "hard problem"[1] of consciousness that Chalmers famously posited. Another way of putting it might be that there is simply no coherent scientific framework within which consciousness is well defined. It seems to have no place in any science-based ontological scheme. It seems outside any established scientific categorization of what exists. Which is of course what makes consciousness so interesting! 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness
- Kim_Bruning 3y agoA bit like the gods, in that respect. Maybe Consciousness doesn't actually exist.
- ttctciyf 3y agoYou doubt that you have experiences?
- Kim_Bruning 3y agoYou doubt the existence of thunder and lighting? But surely those prove the might of the great Jupiter! All joking aside : Of course I'm not particularly married to the position that "Consciousness doesn't exist". But it seems a bit suss that it has been so ill defined for so long. Some days I really do wonder if maybe it belongs in the same pre-scientific category as Vis Vitalis or Luminiferous Ether.
- louwrentius 3y agoThe qualitative nature of our experience is what I think is difficult to understand (may relate to qualia although I ‘m not fond of the term. We know all our inputs are electrical. But why pain is bad and food can taste so good feels like a hard issue. And I’m not even talking about cognition. Pain and pleasure start with sensory data submitted by electrical signals. But what is it that experiences one signal as pain and the other signal as pleasure? Why do we feel there’s something that experiences these sensations, that decides it feels good/bad. It’s easy to just say “evolutionary pressures” but it may explain the how-we-got-here but not how it actually works. And on top of all of that there’s abstract reasoning that we do well, which we can’t reproduce with all the ML and computer power in the world. But let’s forget about this now. If we can ‘just’ explain the qualitative nature of our experience and what that “something” is that experiences things in the first place, that would be beyond interesting. Oh and because of nothing, the brain seems more like an FPGA that a system with separate static hardware and software. Like the hardware and software are intertwined and the computer analogy really doesn’t apply.
- Kim_Bruning 3y agoSee also: Could a neuroscientist understand a microprocessor? https://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article/file?id=10.1371/journal.pcbi.1005268&type=printable https://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article/file?id=10.13...
- fbdab103 3y agoI really dislike these types of papers. "Pfft look at these neanderthals studying complex system X by observing surface properties and trying to make deep inferences! Nothing like us mighty computer spacemen!" A circuit is a highly systemic, regular design which can be precisely studied in isolation. It is not so easy to carve up a human brain, cell, or metabolic process so that one can study this thing hidden to the human eye. The only tools available require working within artificial constraints to have any hope of picking up trends. Biology is incredibly messy full of overlapping systems, sometimes operating at cross purposes.
- civilitty 3y ago> It is not so easy to carve up a human brain, cell, or metabolic process so that one can study this thing hidden to the human eye. It's basically impossible when studying biological systems. Can you imagine trying to understand human digestion in isolation from the gut microbiome? Even if you had perfect information about what the digestive system does, you'd still be completely missing half of the big picture.
- Solvency 3y agoSame goes for nearly all cellular processes. Metabolism is virtually impossible to define as a series of discrete elegant deterministic procedural steps and properties. Same goes for insulin, and all other hormones. You can't even try to think of something like insulin as massive polynomial function where you might eventually understand all of the variables involved and how they affect said function. In fact the function could completely change at any time depending on other esoteric confounding factors in the body. It's absolutely insane. In fact almost all biological functions in the body can be described as trillions of chemicals and chemical pathways interacting in infinitely complicated ways that just so happen to occasionally result in enough homeostasis to support the macroscopic survival of said organism because of a sloppy brute force evolutionary system that took centuries to unfold.
- nologic01 3y agoIf you think about it (pun) we have little clue how the higher functions of the brain come about (assuming consciousness is a higher function), how they might be connected, what is innate and what grows only after cultural seeding. The problem is not necessarily intractable. Despite the pretense of omnipotent scientific capabilities (which is now in obscene display with the AI craze) in fact our mental models for explaining things have not advanced very much after the 19th century. Explaining the brain captivates our brains and we attribute special, even metaphysical signifance to it, but the fact is we havent explained any complex system. In other words, how would you even explain "consciousness". In words? In mathematical equations? As a reproducible experiment? As inexplicable "behavior" in some cellular automaton?
- methou 3y agoReading this reminds me of my first work at a big lab in the field of cognitive sciences. Basic we were tracing the source of visual awareness which is a part of consciousness. The goal is to find identify the tiniest bit leads to awareness of visual perception of objects, is it bottom-up like pixels to shapes to boom! It's a circle! or it's a ring! Or is it top down, I feel that there's a hole, and then figure out what that about. The academic debates are like 30 some years long about this, but pixels take the leads because it is easier to implement with math, you can get a computer to "understand" moderately complex shapes, or identify the owners of many many faces. Anyway it ties at the understanding of topology of images, could a computer understand a shape however its properties changes? In motion pictures, is a movement considered to be an appearance of new object with "destruction" of old one, or just a move. How do you define that in the language of mathematics that both covers machine and human vision. It was some joyful years of working with the scientists but I was too under-educated to even remember how have they put computability and topology in the same work.
- Simon_O_Rourke 3y agoSeems like a bit of an optimistic bet even back in the day. I wonder what time scale they might put on achieving the same goal today?
- sfpotter 3y agoDamn, what is this? A college dorm room?
- adverbly 3y agoGodel, Escher, Bach was almost 20 when they made this bet, and it is still the most influential piece I've read on the possible mechanisms behind consciousness. Not only would I say we haven't solved anything, an argument could be made we moved further in the 50 to 25 years range than we did in the last 25.
- wilonth 3y agoTrying to understand how the 86 billions of neurons in humans achieve consciousness is like trying to understand how the billions of weights in ChatGPT interact with each other. Basically impossible impossibility. For a system which derives its behavior from complex interactions between those billion components, you can only understand its origins how it was tuned, and some high-level concepts of its workings. (Which we already achieved both for human brain and ANN). Not sure what the neuroscientists are even researching at this point, has there been any major findings from neuroscience in the last 10 years? (With similar kind of impact as Transformers in 2017?)
- interlinked 3y agoWe can ask it complex questions and see how the neurons activate similar to an MRI. I bet someone in OpenAI is doing it right now.
- Balgair 3y agoNeuro research is diverse, just like any field. In my neck of the woods, intracellular stuff, some of the large findings are (in no particular order): -Cilia regulate hormonal changes (thing we thought did nothing, does a lot) -Astrocytes participate in non-electrical modulation of the synapse (it's not just electricity you have to worry about now) -CLARITY, just in general -Opsins and light based stimulation of the neuron (use light to make them fire) -Just all the crazy shit from CRISPR-CAS9 Anyone in other fields of neuro, please chime in.
- keernan 3y ago
- derbOac 3y agoMy guess — and this is a guess, not an assertion — is that the hard problem is one of physics and not cognitive science or neuroscience per se.
- goatlover 3y agoSo panpsychism, property dualism, neutral monism or idealism?
- derbOac 3y agoI think what I'm thinking is usually closer to property dualism although I think those positions are similar enough they all make sense to me as possibilities in some form, to the extent I remember them correctly. I've generally convinced myself at times that consciousness in the hard sense of qualia is probably related to physical information over time, and might reflect potential physical properties of all physical entities.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- nisay 3y ago[flagged]
- seydor 3y agoNo, it's Egocentric idiot #1 vs Egocentric idiot #2 . Please don't lump all neuroscientists and philosophers with them
- photochemsyn 3y agoI really don't see how this definition of consciousness in humans differs from that of consciousness in a bee, or a jellyfish, or a squirrel.
- quus 3y agoIm a grad student in philosophy, and this one unfortunately risks perpetuating the annoying myth that philosophers are somehow in competition with the natural sciences — usually believed by people who have literally never taken any courses in philosophy. Quine said that philosophical inquiry is continuous with empirical inquiry, but I think it’d be fine to say that it’s just complementary.
- mananaysiempre 3y agoMy philosophy professor had a multi-volume (non-English-language) textbook called “Introduction to the science of philosophy”, so, uh, I dunno. Claiming it’s complementary is also not benign—it brings along the burden of pointing out some holes in the scientific enterprise, a general conception of how to fill them, and at least some practical success in doing so. I don’t believe that to be impossible and have some things I could suggest there, but I also carry the common scepticism caused by philosophers not getting literally anything right about the 20th-century-physics picture of the world right ahead of time, so I don’t believe it trivial either. (Yeah, quantum computing and microscopic, low-energy quantum physics in general is kind of an exception to my provocative assertion above, though one could argue that the people who started that were from a counterculture of physics first and philosophers only as a consequence of that. I don’t really want to throw shade on philosophers here, only to express my bewilderment that people who made it their life’s work to speculate what the stuff of the world could be got it so wrong so many times. People in other fields also got it all wrong, of course, but then they didn’t claim to be particularly serious about their speculation.)
- quus 3y agoI’m not sure what your professor writing some book with a vague title is meant to show. Am I supposed to google this to find the thesis? Yes, there is a sub area called philosophy of science, and many people in that area are trained in philosophy and science. But I’m unsure why you think philosophers are supposed to be getting empirical facts about physics right ahead of the physicists. That’s not their job.
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- moritzwarhier 3y ago> Consciousness is everything a person experiences — what they taste, hear, feel and more. It is what gives meaning and value to our lives, Chalmers says. > Despite a vast effort — and a 25-year bet — researchers still don’t understand how our brains produce it, however. “It started off as a very big philosophical mystery,” Chalmers adds. “But over the years, it’s gradually been transmuting into, if not a ‘scientific’ mystery, at least one that we can get a partial grip on scientifically.” I'm sure these two scientists have interesting things to say that I never thought about. But I stopped reading the article at this point, because that's where I expected a precise definition of consciousness. That first sentence isn't one as far as I am concerned. Philosophy without strict definitions and a common language tends to be useless. And I love philosophy and consider it the root of all science.
- a_cardboard_box 3y agoConsciousness is something some beings experience. We have direct knowledge that it exists because we experience it. We can assign a word to this experience, but we can't define it objectively such that a non-conscious being would understand it. That doesn't mean it's useless to talk about this real experience we have. It just means we can never be entirely sure we're talking about the same thing.
- moritzwarhier 3y ago> We can assign a word to this experience, but we can't define it objectively such that a non-conscious being would understand it. That doesn't mean it's useless to talk about this real experience we have. That's undeniably true and I feel somewhat sorry having used the term "useless" in my comment, then again I don't. The best teacher I had in school days was a philosophy Ph.d. who pivoted to middle and high school teaching for a while (then quit it after a couple of years). His favorite subjects included Thomas Aquin and Plato. When I say "precise definitions", I don't claim to understand the argument wholesale, nor did I want to dismiss talking about "subjective" experience. I have deep respect for philosophy as the non-specialized root of all science, as I said. This includes thinking about what my scare-quoted qualifier "subjective" means. My comment was meant to be a half-assed critique justifying why I didn't RTFA, after having it half-read. Importantly (even if half-assed), a critique of the article, not its subject matter. It just felt like a logical omission and therefore an impleasant reading flow for a pop sci article. If there had been an introductory sentence to that paragraph to qualify the definition, I wouldn't have commented.
- grantcas 3y ago[dead]
- bananabiscuit 3y agoIs it possible consciousness will not be ever explained by physical sciences because it is exactly outside of the domain of what science was invented to explain? Physical science takes on as axioms that the laws of physics are uniform everywhere and that there is no preferred observer. The experience of consciousness is exactly opposite to those two things. It very much is the consequence of you being a preferred observer and experiencing the physics around you in a way that physics assumes no thing can.
- riwsky 3y ago“Given my chosen definition of consciousness as XYZ, is it possible that consciousness is XYZ?”
- bananabiscuit 3y agoI’m going based on what my experience of consciousness is. Why do I need to look up some definition when I can just refer to any given second of my experience on this earth to see what it is and what properties it has?
- goatlover 3y agoAlternatively, "Given my chosen definition of the world, I will define consciousness so that it is not XYZ".
- xmonkee 3y agoThis will always fail because the premise is wrong. Consciousness does not arise in the brain. Brain activity correlates to impressions in consciousness, but consciousness is not a “thing”. Consciousness is equivalent to identity. You are that which sees all this that you see. Consciousness IS you. You don’t arise in your own brain.
- IshKebab 3y agoThis is nonsense. You don't lose your identity when you fall asleep. Consciousness is clearly a thing that you can have or not have. A brain can exist without it being conscious.
- Avlin67 3y agoconciousness is defined by memory
- dangitnotagain 3y agoThe “consciousness is the inflection upon the substrate of existential being” hypothesis suggests that consciousness does not arise from the complexity of the mind, the complexity of the mind arises from the technology of consciousness. Firstly let me say human consciousness is many layers of personification and abstract meaning, all of which wonder of existential awareness of being as the ultimate actualization of those who have it. This proposition is that it is existential reality itself that is dormant “potential of being”, which biotechnology animates and extends. The scope of consciousness lies in whatever the substrate is made of. In our case, likely the 2D crystal lattices of neuron microtubules. These through aggregation couple and combine such that a shared resolution may capture and reveal an analog “image”, much like wave front holography. Many sub-scopes compete for the illusion of singular awareness consciousness which gets us wondering. It is this holographic sieve that can be said the echo chamber of one’s personal consciousness. All of the wetware provides perception, enables action, and an ideal container for this process to occur. Further, neural and behavioral strategies structure and develop character of individual cognition, creating such variety of conjecture as we find among us. By this sieve of consciousness, and the distribution of potential over time, all strategies of life may emerge. That primitive continuity of will which determines to exist comes by the capacity to maintain corporeal scope of existential being. Life technology emerges from the intrinsic capacity for consciousness as a sieve of the potential of existential being. Consciousness, how ever large or small is the inflection upon this potential of existential being.
- genman 3y agoThis title is stupid.
- harrishong 3y agoNot sure if anyone lost on this. Consciousness has already been discovered in modern AI algorithm (especially in Google's). Just needs to be published.