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Well the undiscovered part is why it should feel like anything at all. And this is definitely relevant because consciousness clearly exists enough that we exer

by kaibee 3y ago

Well the undiscovered part is why it should feel like anything at all. And this is definitely relevant because consciousness clearly exists enough that we exert physical force about it, so its gotta be somewhere in physics. But where?

idle_zealot 3y ago
Why does it need to be in physics? What would that look like, a Qualia Boson? It could be an emergent property like life itself. Physics doesn't "explain" life, it explains the physical mechanisms behind the chemical interactions that ultimately produce life by virtue of self-replicating patterns spreading and mutating. There is no Life is physics, and yet we see it all around it because it emerges as a complex result of fundamental rules. My expectation is that experience is emergent from computation that controls an agent and models the world around that agent, and that experience isn't a binary. A tree is more aware than a rock, an ant more than a tree, a squirrel more than an ant, and so on until you reach humans, but there may not be any real change in kind as the conditions for experience become more developed. I guess my real point is that I don't view experience or consciousness as something special or exceptional. My guess is that over time we come to understand how the brain works better and better but never find anything that definitively explains consciousness because it's totally subjective and immeasurable. We eventually produce computers complex enough to behave totally convincingly human, and they will claim to be conscious, maybe even be granted personhood, but we'll never actually know for sure if they experience the world, just like we don't know that other humans do.
- PH95VuimJjqBqy 3y ago
  If life is an emergent property of physics then it's replicable which means it's not spiritual.
robwwilliams 3y ago
Toward the end of Hofstadter’s Gödel, Escher, Bach there is a simple and plausible recursive attentional explanation, but without any serious neuroscience. The thalamo-cortico-thalamic system is a massively recursive CNS system. Ray Guillery’s biok The Brain As A Tool is a good introduction to the relevant neuroscience with a hat tip to consciousness written long after GEB.

by kaibee 3y ago

idle_zealot 3y ago

Why does it need to be in physics? What would that look like, a Qualia Boson? It could be an emergent property like life itself. Physics doesn't "explain" life, it explains the physical mechanisms behind the chemical interactions that ultimately produce life by virtue of self-replicating patterns spreading and mutating. There is no Life is physics, and yet we see it all around it because it emerges as a complex result of fundamental rules. My expectation is that experience is emergent from computation that controls an agent and models the world around that agent, and that experience isn't a binary. A tree is more aware than a rock, an ant more than a tree, a squirrel more than an ant, and so on until you reach humans, but there may not be any real change in kind as the conditions for experience become more developed. I guess my real point is that I don't view experience or consciousness as something special or exceptional. My guess is that over time we come to understand how the brain works better and better but never find anything that definitively explains consciousness because it's totally subjective and immeasurable. We eventually produce computers complex enough to behave totally convincingly human, and they will claim to be conscious, maybe even be granted personhood, but we'll never actually know for sure if they experience the world, just like we don't know that other humans do.

PH95VuimJjqBqy 3y ago
If life is an emergent property of physics then it's replicable which means it's not spiritual.

robwwilliams 3y ago

Toward the end of Hofstadter’s Gödel, Escher, Bach there is a simple and plausible recursive attentional explanation, but without any serious neuroscience. The thalamo-cortico-thalamic system is a massively recursive CNS system. Ray Guillery’s biok The Brain As A Tool is a good introduction to the relevant neuroscience with a hat tip to consciousness written long after GEB.