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I'm also a cocktail philosopher, but isn't consciousness different to just having a model of the world and self within it? Consciousness is the lived experience

I'm also a cocktail philosopher, but isn't consciousness different to just having a model of the world and self within it? Consciousness is the lived experience. The world model and feeling of self appear in consciousness. I think a complex system could plausibly be conscious without having a belief of a self within it. Not sure if consciousness is possible without any world model though. My impressions about this were strongly influenced by Sam Harris's Waking Up book and app.

teekert 3y ago
I agree that "consciousness is different to just having a model of the world and self within it" indeed. I'm just saying it feels like that modelling ability (which has clear and major evolutionary advantages) is a step towards consciousness, indeed something in the now (as we experience it). A (near) real-time model perhaps that constantly projects and adjusts. I guess this still doesn't require consciousness, but maybe consciousness results from this? Does it require a sense of "now" and identity relative to the world model? I feel like the matrix is about the eject me btw. Thanx, I'm looking for Harris' books right now.
- krzat 3y ago
  Mixing consciousness with cognition is a mistake, Imagine a conscious experience of constant redness and nothing else, is there any intelligence needed for this?
  - teekert 3y ago
    I think all these term are too loaded and deep to answer your question, almost all words in the sentences we exchange are subject to subtle interpretation and definition differences. I still enjoy the process though, which perhaps also doesn't require consciousness, yet here I am.
  - tsimionescu 3y ago
    I think it's arguable that this "conscious experience of nothing but constant redness" might not be actually possible. We can imagine it, of course, but we can also imagine many things that can't actually exist in the world. It's similar to the idea about p-zombies: just because a concept exists doesn't mean it's physically realizable. It's very much possible that what we would call consciousness can only exist in certain types of minds that have a particular level of intelligence, but also a particular structure. Of course, it's also possible that you're right and the two are entirely separate, and that consciousness doesn't require intelligence (and possibly vice-versa).
    - krzat 3y ago
      Perhaps, that's the question. What is required for the simplest possible consciousness?
      - pegasus 3y ago
        Good question, being investigated in the field of consciousness studies. Like Thomas Metzinger's minimal phenomenal selfhood: https://youtu.be/8f4ykI9har8 https://youtu.be/8f4ykI9har8
  - quonn 3y ago
    The reason why this is likely not possible is because consciousness appears to require a notion of time passing by and having a constant experience means that there is no time. For time to exist some sort of motion is needed, including either internal motion like the perception of breathing or a heartbeat or a train of thought or external ones like a clock or a change of color from red to blue.
    - vidarh 3y ago
      We have no way of knowing whether there is any time even with the "notion of time passing", as that notion depends on a notion of memory of a past, and we have no way of knowing if that is real, including whether or not there is a train of thought or any change.
      - quonn 3y ago
        You are misunderstanding what I wrote.
        vidarh 3y ago
        I don't think so. The point being that we can't tell whether we're having a "constant experience" or not, and we can't tell from that whether or not there's any time or no time, or punctuated time, nor can we for that matter tell whether consciousness requires any notion of time. It's all pure speculation because we have no way of assessing it outside of our own frame of reference. E.g. I see you in another answer saying that "the fact is that all kinds of state changes happen", but we don't know if any state changes ever happen. We have no way of telling a dynamic universe apart from a static one where we're all just suspended in a single unchanging moment. We can choose to handwave a lot of this away ordinarily because as long as the experience is reasonably consistent it makes sense to assume it is objectively real, because we have nothing better. It doesn't matter if the world didn't exist a second ago when e.g. considering whether gravity work, because it appears as if it did. But when trying to determine the nature of consciousness we run headlong into the fact our observation of consciousness is direct only in the case of ourself, and even then heavily limited. We have no direct measure that puts us in a position to prove consciousness even in other people. We can show that within our perceived world we can measure brain activity that correlates to though, but not whether that reflects merely the operation of an automata, or the existence of consciousness, or if there is a distinction at all. As such, it's meaningless to suggest we have a way of saying much about the limitations of consciousness at all.
- pixl97 3y ago
  At least when it comes to human level consciousness, I agree it's something 'more than', but what exactly? If we look at our advancing world models in things like self driving cars, when would we consider them conscious by our own rules? It has a sensor network that keeps track of it's own internal states. It has external sensors that monitor the external world and adjust it's internal state. The internal state attempts to predict future states and take actions to avoid negative outcomes. So when does this loop become something we consider consciousness?
tsimionescu 3y ago
One possibility at least is that "the experience" is not something that really happens. That is, it's possible that we don't actually "feel" anything, and our impression that we are is just the story that our self-model comes up to explain (and help predict) our reactions to ourselves. Just like our world model has ideas like "the rock wants to fall down", it's possible that our self-model does too. We already know that our self-model can be entirely wrong about our feelings. People with paralyzed or even missing limbs often believe that they just don't want to move that limb at first. So, they think they are having one experience, but they are wrong about their own internal experience: in fact, they are not moving that limb because they can't. And there are many other similar examples of people being wrong about their own intenal experiences, typically but not exclusively because of some illness. So, it's possible that our internal experiences are in fact only a model in which one part of our brain interprets the actions of other parts of our brain, often retroactively. Note: I'm not claiming this is the truth or silly things like "if you believe in science you have to believe this". It's just another cocktail philosopher's story of what consciousness might be. Other stories are just as plausible, and just as consistent with the little we do know in this area.
- jebarker 3y ago
  It definitely seems like aspects of conscious experience are just more parts of the world model, e.g. we experience having a continual visual view of the world through our eyes, like watching a movie, but we know that's not what is actually happening physically. Where I get confused though is this sentence: "...the story that our self-model comes up to explain (and help predict) our reactions to ourselves". What is "ourselves" here? That implies some observer that the self-model is explaining things to.
  - evv555 3y ago
    Speaking in the context of thinkers like Harris this is the reason why awareness is differentiated from consciousness. Consciousness is the ability to grasp the world "out there". Awareness is the blank canvas where consciousness is experienced. The analogy here is a movie projected onto a movie screen. Consciousness is the movie being played. The screen is the blank space of experience where the movie is projected. I think the confusion is there is no logically consistent differentiation of concepts like intelligence, consciousness, awareness in the sciences and they end up being used interchangeably.

teekert 3y ago

I agree that "consciousness is different to just having a model of the world and self within it" indeed. I'm just saying it feels like that modelling ability (which has clear and major evolutionary advantages) is a step towards consciousness, indeed something in the now (as we experience it). A (near) real-time model perhaps that constantly projects and adjusts. I guess this still doesn't require consciousness, but maybe consciousness results from this? Does it require a sense of "now" and identity relative to the world model? I feel like the matrix is about the eject me btw. Thanx, I'm looking for Harris' books right now.

krzat 3y ago
Mixing consciousness with cognition is a mistake, Imagine a conscious experience of constant redness and nothing else, is there any intelligence needed for this?
- teekert 3y ago
  I think all these term are too loaded and deep to answer your question, almost all words in the sentences we exchange are subject to subtle interpretation and definition differences. I still enjoy the process though, which perhaps also doesn't require consciousness, yet here I am.
- tsimionescu 3y ago
  I think it's arguable that this "conscious experience of nothing but constant redness" might not be actually possible. We can imagine it, of course, but we can also imagine many things that can't actually exist in the world. It's similar to the idea about p-zombies: just because a concept exists doesn't mean it's physically realizable. It's very much possible that what we would call consciousness can only exist in certain types of minds that have a particular level of intelligence, but also a particular structure. Of course, it's also possible that you're right and the two are entirely separate, and that consciousness doesn't require intelligence (and possibly vice-versa).
  - krzat 3y ago
    Perhaps, that's the question. What is required for the simplest possible consciousness?
    - pegasus 3y ago
      Good question, being investigated in the field of consciousness studies. Like Thomas Metzinger's minimal phenomenal selfhood: https://youtu.be/8f4ykI9har8 https://youtu.be/8f4ykI9har8
- quonn 3y ago
  The reason why this is likely not possible is because consciousness appears to require a notion of time passing by and having a constant experience means that there is no time. For time to exist some sort of motion is needed, including either internal motion like the perception of breathing or a heartbeat or a train of thought or external ones like a clock or a change of color from red to blue.
  - vidarh 3y ago
    We have no way of knowing whether there is any time even with the "notion of time passing", as that notion depends on a notion of memory of a past, and we have no way of knowing if that is real, including whether or not there is a train of thought or any change.
    - quonn 3y ago
      You are misunderstanding what I wrote.
      - vidarh 3y ago
        I don't think so. The point being that we can't tell whether we're having a "constant experience" or not, and we can't tell from that whether or not there's any time or no time, or punctuated time, nor can we for that matter tell whether consciousness requires any notion of time. It's all pure speculation because we have no way of assessing it outside of our own frame of reference. E.g. I see you in another answer saying that "the fact is that all kinds of state changes happen", but we don't know if any state changes ever happen. We have no way of telling a dynamic universe apart from a static one where we're all just suspended in a single unchanging moment. We can choose to handwave a lot of this away ordinarily because as long as the experience is reasonably consistent it makes sense to assume it is objectively real, because we have nothing better. It doesn't matter if the world didn't exist a second ago when e.g. considering whether gravity work, because it appears as if it did. But when trying to determine the nature of consciousness we run headlong into the fact our observation of consciousness is direct only in the case of ourself, and even then heavily limited. We have no direct measure that puts us in a position to prove consciousness even in other people. We can show that within our perceived world we can measure brain activity that correlates to though, but not whether that reflects merely the operation of an automata, or the existence of consciousness, or if there is a distinction at all. As such, it's meaningless to suggest we have a way of saying much about the limitations of consciousness at all.
pixl97 3y ago
At least when it comes to human level consciousness, I agree it's something 'more than', but what exactly? If we look at our advancing world models in things like self driving cars, when would we consider them conscious by our own rules? It has a sensor network that keeps track of it's own internal states. It has external sensors that monitor the external world and adjust it's internal state. The internal state attempts to predict future states and take actions to avoid negative outcomes. So when does this loop become something we consider consciousness?

tsimionescu 3y ago

One possibility at least is that "the experience" is not something that really happens. That is, it's possible that we don't actually "feel" anything, and our impression that we are is just the story that our self-model comes up to explain (and help predict) our reactions to ourselves. Just like our world model has ideas like "the rock wants to fall down", it's possible that our self-model does too. We already know that our self-model can be entirely wrong about our feelings. People with paralyzed or even missing limbs often believe that they just don't want to move that limb at first. So, they think they are having one experience, but they are wrong about their own internal experience: in fact, they are not moving that limb because they can't. And there are many other similar examples of people being wrong about their own intenal experiences, typically but not exclusively because of some illness. So, it's possible that our internal experiences are in fact only a model in which one part of our brain interprets the actions of other parts of our brain, often retroactively. Note: I'm not claiming this is the truth or silly things like "if you believe in science you have to believe this". It's just another cocktail philosopher's story of what consciousness might be. Other stories are just as plausible, and just as consistent with the little we do know in this area.

jebarker 3y ago
It definitely seems like aspects of conscious experience are just more parts of the world model, e.g. we experience having a continual visual view of the world through our eyes, like watching a movie, but we know that's not what is actually happening physically. Where I get confused though is this sentence: "...the story that our self-model comes up to explain (and help predict) our reactions to ourselves". What is "ourselves" here? That implies some observer that the self-model is explaining things to.
- evv555 3y ago
  Speaking in the context of thinkers like Harris this is the reason why awareness is differentiated from consciousness. Consciousness is the ability to grasp the world "out there". Awareness is the blank canvas where consciousness is experienced. The analogy here is a movie projected onto a movie screen. Consciousness is the movie being played. The screen is the blank space of experience where the movie is projected. I think the confusion is there is no logically consistent differentiation of concepts like intelligence, consciousness, awareness in the sciences and they end up being used interchangeably.