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> an emergent phenomenon resulting from any sufficiently powerful cognitive system This is a meme that gets thrown around a lot but if you think about it you’l
by hcks 3y ago
> an emergent phenomenon resulting from any sufficiently powerful cognitive system
This is a meme that gets thrown around a lot but if you think about it you’ll realise it’s meaningless.
Also it’s not possible to measure consciousness (in the ”hard“ sense, as in ”why do I have qualia”, obviously you can assert something respond to external stimuli easily), therefore the question won’t ever be answered.
- colonwqbang 3y agoMaybe you could try to explain why you think the person is wrong? If the answer was so obvious as you seem to suggest, why was a bet made in the first place?
- andrepd 3y agoExactly. It's an "unscientific" question in the sense that it cannot be measured empirically, as the "hard question of consciousness" is precisely explaining the subjective experience of internal consciousness, which by definition cannot be externally observed.
- hnfong 3y agoI think the "hard" qualia question can potentially be answered by the emergence argument. The much more difficult part of "why do I have qualia" is not the qualia part, but why am "I" attached to this body's consciousness, as opposed to the billions of other candidates?
- imtringued 3y agoThis isn't just relevant to other people. The question is also 'why does a human form a single consciousness?'. If consciousness emerges purely from information exchange in a complex system, then consciousness would be primarily driven by communication interactions between regions of the human brain and the rest of the body. This in turn means that there should be a way to merge or split consciousnesses. For example, a bidirection man machine man interface would allow two humans to form one shared consciousness given a high bandwidth communication link. This can be tested.
- Kim_Bruning 3y agoIf I were to run a single-threaded program on a dual core machine, would it run twice as fast? I'm not suggesting this is a strong analogy, perhaps, but I don't see why putting a high bandwidth link between two brains would necessarily do anything at all. (Actually -since human brains are very adaptable- maybe we would see something happen. But emergence is not something magical. It happens when parts that are made to go together are actually together. Eg. when you assemble cogs and cylinders and wheels into a car. The whole is more than the sum of the parts. If you mix in some random parts from a cruise ship, you don't suddenly get a car that can go on water and carry 1000 passengers. You just get a bunch of parts that don't go together )
- maxerickson 3y agoAnalogy doesn't really inform us about the unknown. If we knew what consciousness is, we could make sweeping assertions about what is possible. We don't know what consciousness is.
- Kim_Bruning 3y agoI don't disagree!
- saurik 3y agoThis discussion explicitly started with the assertion that "consciousness 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"; note carefully the word "any", as that's what this downthread discussion has been pushing hard against, and what the thought experiment you are arguing against is itself directed at. You, instead, seem to be very much in agreement and seem to be in alignment with this other side thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36462646 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36462646
- chromoblob 3y agoHow would you test that?
- liamwire 3y agoSomething akin to the anthropic principle seems relevant here. Feeling that ‘I’m’ attached this body is what it feels like to be these atoms. If I were instead composed of your atoms, it follows I might find myself wondering the exact same question.
- kbelder 3y agoRight. There's no way you wouldn't be asking that question, therefore it's kind of meaningless.
- mensetmanusman 3y ago:hand waves emergent: :Solves everything complicated: