6 ms·

Consciousness is not a well-scoped object of scientific investigation. It doesn't have a definition or characterization based on observable things or behavior.

• jfengel 3y ago
  That'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 ago
    Didn'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 ago
      In order to understand, then we'd have to have a good definition, no?
    • imtringued 3y ago
      You 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 ago
      They 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.
    • mannykannot 3y ago
      The article says the bet is this: "Christof Koch bet philosopher David Chalmers that the mechanism by which the brain’s neurons produce consciousness would be discovered by 2023." It is a straightforward fact that no such mechanism has been discovered, and that is all we need to show that Koch has lost the bet.
  • 0xEF 3y ago
    Personally, I wish scientist made more of these public friendly bets. I feel they really help promote the discussion to a wider audience abd brings a bit of spirited competition to the matter rather than the capitalist motives we normally see with research. Something like The Long Now's Long Bets but with your average scientists where us regular folk can throw our two cents in (without the membership fee).
    • jfengel 3y ago
      I'm a big fan of public engagement with science, but it's a double edged sword. A lot of people get the impression that they have a good handle on it and an opinion that demands attention. I cannot tell you how tired I am of people arguing about the merits of string theory, where effectively none of the people involved know even the first thing about it. It's not that people shouldn't get involved, but involvement should be more than just cheerleading as if it were a sports game. Maybe that's inevitable. Maybe the public engagement will always produce 99 dunces shouting and one young scientist who goes on to study it for real. But it can be disheartening when it looks as if 100% of the public discussion is both ignorant and mean.
• zvmaz 3y ago
  > 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. Conscious experience is an observable thing, meaning that we can subjectively experience it and infer its existence in other sentient beings (including in cows and pigs), and it is part of nature. The problem is, we still have no good idea how it comes to be.
  • civilized 3y ago
    I don't think you experience or observe consciousness. It's a property you have. You are conscious. It's not like how you can experience or observe redness by looking at something red.
  • amelius 3y ago
    > The problem is, we still have no good idea how it comes to be. Does that matter? We also don't have a good idea how gravity comes to be.
    • wk_end 3y ago
      But I'm sure every physicist on Earth would love a deeper explanation of how gravity comes to be. The motivational basis of science (and philosophy!) as an exercise is filling in the lacunae in our understanding of the world; everything we don't know about matters.
• amelius 3y ago
  There are at least two observable things: 1. you have consciousness 2. people are speaking about consciousness The second point makes it likely that consciousness is not simply a consequence of physics, but e.g. that it loops back into it; or perhaps it is more likely (because simpler) that physics is a consequence of consciousness.
  • Aardwolf 3y ago
    Can you please elaborate why point 2 does that? You can never prove others have consciousness, no matter what they say (I'm not saying they don't).
    • amelius 3y ago
      Note that I carefully used the word "likely". There is no proof. Simply Occam's razor. Why would something that has no consciousness make up that it has consciousness?
      • Aardwolf 3y ago
        > Why would something that has no consciousness make up that it has consciousness? You can make a computer program `printf("I have consciousness\n");` But I actually also didn't follow the rest of the argument. How does whether other people say they have consciousness or not, tell anything about whether it's physics based or not? If it's physics based, people could say they have consciousness. If it's not physics based, they could also say that?
        • amelius 3y ago
          The argument goes as follows: 1. People are talking about consciousness. 2. This talking happens in the physical world (soundwaves are being produced, etc.) 3. We assume that other people have consciousness since they talk about it. As you say, there is no absolute proof of this, but Occam's razor makes it silly to assume otherwise. 4. So, the soundwaves (physics) are happening because of consciousness. There is a causal link from consciousness to physics. This means that consciousness is not simply the observation of physics. It actually loops back into it, or physics is an emergent property of consciousness.
• munch117 3y ago
  Definition: Consciousness is those parts of the workings of the brain that are available to introspection. End definition. People so love to throw all kinds of babble under the heading of consciousness, so there's scant chance that people will agree on any kind of definition, let alone this one. But it's what I've been using, and I find that it makes all the supposedly hard questions about consciousness very simple to answer.
  • kmod 3y ago
    `ps` is a way of introspecting about a computer "brain". Is that consciousness?
    • gfody 3y ago
      sort of. ambiguity is a nice feature of language. it wouldn't confuse anyone to say you were digging into your computer's consciousness.
  • hungryforcodes 3y ago
    But this is a totally meaningless definition. It says nothing about the phenominalogical experience of consciousness in a meaningful way and contains nothing that is scientifically falsifiable.
    • munch117 3y ago
      > contains nothing that is scientifically falsifiable It's observable. You simply ask people what they have been or are thinking or sensing. If they are able to relate that, then, by the definition, they were conscious about it. Of course they might be lying or misremember; introspection is not intersubjective, and therefore hard to create reproducible experiments around. But that doesn't mean introspective information doesn't exist. > says nothing about the phenominalogical experience of consciousness in a meaningful way What kind of experience is observable, except by introspection? The only observations of experiences that anyone can have are through either one's own introspection, or through what others have related of their introspection. If you are to say that you have had a "phenomenological experience of consciousness" that you want me to explain, then you are giving an introspective report of a brain process that left an imprint that you can now describe. If the experience was not available to introspection, then you wouldn't be asking, because you wouldn't realise there was an experience at all.
• FollowingTheDao 3y ago
  My theory: Consciousness is a comparison of current sense input with memory. No sense input, no consciousness. No memory, no consciousness. A rock, can have a memory (its chips and wear), but no consciousness since it has no sense input. Self Consciousness is therefore a comparison of the input of our senses with the memory of our Self.
• paxys 3y ago
  The bet essentially was that we would be able to understand and define consciousness based on what we found inside the brain.