9 ms·

You can say that. You can say a lot of things to explain consciousness in a materialistic sense, as in how it could've emerged. But I cannot fathom how material

by harha_ 3y ago

You can say that. You can say a lot of things to explain consciousness in a materialistic sense, as in how it could've emerged. But I cannot fathom how material interacting with other material and forces gives arise to subjective experience. It simply makes no sense to me. If I create a copy of my brain, it would be conscious, but with its own unique subjective experience. This makes sense so far, but what exactly is this subjective experience and how can "mere" mechanical matter create such an entity. So in short: I cannot understand what is the actual substance of subjective experience.

visarga 3y ago
It only makes sense if - you can represent complex state in a distributed way, so each neuron only encodes a small part of a larger signal - the system has a working model of the environment, including our value judgements for all states, which are basically our emotions Such a system can have experience because it has a latent space to encode experience in. It feels like something to be an agent because of the external environment and internal models of the environment, which include imagination and emotions. And this feeling is essential in choosing our actions, so there is a feedback loop action-to-emotion, then emotion-to-action. Our feelings are causal.
- edgyquant 3y ago
  Experience isn’t the right way to put it. The system you describe is straightforward and makes total sense how it can understand and act upon its environment. What is unexplainable, and perhaps always will be, is the awareness that I am. Even if I meditate and remove all aspects of the surrounding world from me what I’m left with is a pure awareness that groups of neurons simply can’t explain. Why am I present at all and not just a mindless automaton? Surely an automaton could evolve and be just as successful simply by being a complex neural network. This is why I, and lots of others, think that awareness is fundamental.
  - visarga 3y ago
    You can never remove internal body sensations even in meditation. The "self" is just a stationary point in this inner space, an element referenced in most situations, but not all, such as when listening to great music we can forget about ourselves. So my idea was - we have an actual system for representing sensations, a system for imagination and a system for value prediction. We have the hardware for it, and we train our consciousness hardware on environment data. If you're thinking - how can simple neurons or protein interactions do this? it's the same with a neural net. We don't understand how it can tell cats from dogs, or why it can answer our questions so well. Yet it does. Hard to believe unless you see it and even then it's hard to accept, unless you come up with your own private inputs and test it in a way that is sure not to be memorized.
    - edgyquant 3y ago
      No I’m saying it makes total sense that neurons can model the environment and act upon them. That isn’t at all hard to grasp. What is unexplainable is the fundamental awareness of being a thing at all.
      - kozd 3y ago
        Essentially why is it like something to be this system of neurons modeling the environment and acting on it.
        edgyquant 3y ago
        Yes exactly
engineer_22 3y ago
Frankly, your non-understanding is not unique. We're all rowing the same boat :)
sixo 3y ago
I mean. You could write program with a "mind" object that recieves a bunch of data through various sensory "experience". From the perspective of the "mind", the data is "subjective", and the mind is "implemented" in exactly a way that it can represent itself as an entity "I". I don't think the biological reality is conceptually any more complicated, except that the mind and data are complex in exactly a way that completely hides the abstraction, roughly by being very good at ignoring meaningless artifacts of abstraction. The hard part isn't imagining such a subjectivity, but imagining that I am that.
- ChrisClark 3y ago
  But, where does the color red come from? The actual first person experience of seeing red. Not eyes seeing a specific wavelength, but your mind seeing red.
  - wry_discontent 3y ago
    What I find so frustrating in these conversations is exactly this mismatch. There's nothing special about the wavelength that creates the color red, but the color red is completely distinct from that. They're barely even related!
NoMoreNicksLeft 3y ago
If we wrote software to do this, but we were so incompetent that we couldn't fill in the model with correct data, we might just say "who gives a fuck, fill that with random garbage and we'll fix it in a later version". And then we never do. Your subjective experience is that incompetent model. Your model doesn't know how to correctly judge human character, so you misread people and always wonder why they say one thing but another is true, and it doesn't click that they're lying the whole time. You can't keep track of time because the internal clock just isn't implemented, so the who day seems to drag on, or maybe fly by too quickly. It's all just really shitty software. Layers upon layers. And because humans believe this to be some mystical thing, rather than trying to fix it from the inside, they assume that it's awesome, necessary, and why would anyone want to fix it? No small fraction of it is simply because our memory is faulty. The only time you ever remember anything is the first time you remember it, every memory access of that is really you remembering the last time you remembered it. Each access is lossier than the last, and confabulation is guaranteed. This seems to be true even moments after the event. If it was anyone other than evolution who wrote your code, you could sue them for criminal negligence. And that's before we even get to the part where you find out you're not even you. Inside your skull is another being, an intelligent one, with desires and goals. But you can't see, hear, or feel this being. It's invisible. The "you" that I'm talking to, exists because this being once upon a time needed to simulate the other humans around him, so he could anticipate them well enough to not be out-competed. He has a pretty good idea what they'd say if he asked them questions, how they'd respond to threats and challenges, what sets them off (so he can avoid fights). And, by mistake or design, he used this simulator to simulate himself (maybe to bootstrap it? if the simulation's output matches his known answers, it's working correctly?). You're the simulation. When the judge asks the psycho teenager why he put the cat in the microwave and he says "I dunno" he's telling the truth. He does not know why. When your girlfriend cheats on you, and she's crying hysterically and can't tell you why she did it, she's not just lying (either to hurt you or to spare feelings)... she doesn't know. It was that other being in their skulls doing these things. They're just the simulations. Now, you've either been poking around in your own head, seeing little glimpses of what I'm talking about, making you wonder if I'm not on to something, or you're incapable of that. I've met both kinds of people. If you're the former, you're wondering just how much of it I understand, because some of the glimpses paint a slightly different picture from what I describe. That's because our minds weren't built the same way. No two are alike, not in a special snowflake way, but instead like no two shacks in shantytown have the same kind of leaky cardboard roofs. And, if you're the latter...
postmodest 3y ago
Have you ever been under anesthesia like propofol? I feel like most of what we call "consciousness" is converting short term memory into selected long-term memory, facilitated by language. Because then you're under, you can even be "interactive" but you're not conscious of it because your short term memory has been disabled. As to "human intelligence", honestly, I think that human languages that let us convert our "consciousness" into a shared hallucination is the key evolutionary advantage. Human intelligence comprises a hive mind in a sense, that our experience of the world is hugely affected by the shared social experience where language transfers memory from person to person.
- kozd 3y ago
  But why should it be like something to convert short term memory to long term memory? Computational systems can convert data between different forms of memory but we don't typically believe consciousness emerges from this operation.
  - selecsosi 3y ago
    Not to say this addresses the concern but in that case a computation system is being driven by a pure line signal (the power) and is ultimately both dependant on that for operation, and requires a high level of stability of that line to be "effective". The alternative in this case is imagining that you have a biological process that has adaptive energy response controlling the movement from short term, to long term and itself optimizing based on the performance trade-off of input stimulus overload. In that case, the process of deciding what to, and when to move data from short term to long term memory (in a feedback loop) could start to approach more of the appearance of consciousness (choosing what to process, what to remember, adjusting the input rate and types of input based on the limitations of processing and retention). Many animals have consciousness as well so I think it's important to be more open to reducing the bare essentials of what a process of "awareness" is or could be rather than looking at it from a hyper evolved language/information influenced state of humans. Note I agree that it is not consciousness, but i think it's an interesting exploration to look at the modeling of it from computer forms since we are made of non-conscious atoms and still made it here
ambrozk 3y ago
> So in short: I cannot understand what is the actual substance of subjective experience. This problem just goes away if you assume that there is no dividing line between the "experience" of you and the "experience" of any other computational system. Actually try to think, what does a computer "experience"? An atom? What does it feel like to be a standing desk?
- odyssey7 3y ago
  Panpsychism is going mainstream again.
  - ambrozk 3y ago
    It seems like the only solution that's compatible with materialism. If you accept that it "feels like something" to be you, and you accept that your intelligence is just a computational process which differs from others only in the specific computations involved (as I think you should, especially in the age of LLMs), then you must infer that it "feels like something" to be any number of computational processes. If you infer otherwise, you're positing that there's an unmotivated, invisible, in-kind difference between human intelligence and all other physical phenomena which seem to mirror its abilities. The conclusion I come to, which doesn't actually seem that strange, is that what's special about our experience is the complexity of our thought, our ability to turn extremely high-dimensional raw experience into low-dimensional models of reality, our ability to maintain a sense of mostly-stable identity over a long period of time, our capacity for emotion and sensation. It may "feel like something" to be a rock or a standing desk, but it isn't a very interesting or complicated feeling.
    - odyssey7 3y ago
      If we take the behavior of matter as the observable signs of how it feels — this is true if sensation motivates action — then many rich states of sensation have been observed in subatomic particles. The computational process of an organism is evolved to operate the organism, toward survival of the species. I don’t think these sensations would necessarily be more complex than those of subatomic particles, but they would need to be directed by the system to represent the state of the system and the observed environment, to link to actions the system could take, and to bias actions toward survival of the system.
andoando 3y ago
What makes sense to me is that consciousness is not an emergent property but a core of all things, with the additional property that is replicative/additive. That is smaller consciousness's can form larger consciousness's. As to what it is, or why it exists at all, I don't think there will ever be answer to that. It just is. Its definitely a strange thought, but it seems more likely to me than neurons or whatever other brain matter somehow produce consciousness out of thin air as soon as they some level of composition. Pure materialism also seems very ill defined to me. The physical world is after all only observable/detectable/can be studied upon, through conscious experience. At best we can say what is real is what is universally agreed upon by all observing conscious agents. If hypothetically there were only two of us, and I said "There is no ball in front of us" and you said "There is", then what is the meaning of physical true/reality? You can say lets use a detector. But then again, if I experienced the detector as saying false and you said its true, what do we do? It seems unavoidable that reality is a part of conscious experience, and not the other way around.

by harha_ 3y ago

visarga 3y ago

It only makes sense if - you can represent complex state in a distributed way, so each neuron only encodes a small part of a larger signal - the system has a working model of the environment, including our value judgements for all states, which are basically our emotions Such a system can have experience because it has a latent space to encode experience in. It feels like something to be an agent because of the external environment and internal models of the environment, which include imagination and emotions. And this feeling is essential in choosing our actions, so there is a feedback loop action-to-emotion, then emotion-to-action. Our feelings are causal.

edgyquant 3y ago
Experience isn’t the right way to put it. The system you describe is straightforward and makes total sense how it can understand and act upon its environment. What is unexplainable, and perhaps always will be, is the awareness that I am. Even if I meditate and remove all aspects of the surrounding world from me what I’m left with is a pure awareness that groups of neurons simply can’t explain. Why am I present at all and not just a mindless automaton? Surely an automaton could evolve and be just as successful simply by being a complex neural network. This is why I, and lots of others, think that awareness is fundamental.
- visarga 3y ago
  You can never remove internal body sensations even in meditation. The "self" is just a stationary point in this inner space, an element referenced in most situations, but not all, such as when listening to great music we can forget about ourselves. So my idea was - we have an actual system for representing sensations, a system for imagination and a system for value prediction. We have the hardware for it, and we train our consciousness hardware on environment data. If you're thinking - how can simple neurons or protein interactions do this? it's the same with a neural net. We don't understand how it can tell cats from dogs, or why it can answer our questions so well. Yet it does. Hard to believe unless you see it and even then it's hard to accept, unless you come up with your own private inputs and test it in a way that is sure not to be memorized.
  - edgyquant 3y ago
    No I’m saying it makes total sense that neurons can model the environment and act upon them. That isn’t at all hard to grasp. What is unexplainable is the fundamental awareness of being a thing at all.
    - kozd 3y ago
      Essentially why is it like something to be this system of neurons modeling the environment and acting on it.
      - edgyquant 3y ago
        Yes exactly

engineer_22 3y ago

Frankly, your non-understanding is not unique. We're all rowing the same boat :)

sixo 3y ago

I mean. You could write program with a "mind" object that recieves a bunch of data through various sensory "experience". From the perspective of the "mind", the data is "subjective", and the mind is "implemented" in exactly a way that it can represent itself as an entity "I". I don't think the biological reality is conceptually any more complicated, except that the mind and data are complex in exactly a way that completely hides the abstraction, roughly by being very good at ignoring meaningless artifacts of abstraction. The hard part isn't imagining such a subjectivity, but imagining that I am that.

ChrisClark 3y ago
But, where does the color red come from? The actual first person experience of seeing red. Not eyes seeing a specific wavelength, but your mind seeing red.
- wry_discontent 3y ago
  What I find so frustrating in these conversations is exactly this mismatch. There's nothing special about the wavelength that creates the color red, but the color red is completely distinct from that. They're barely even related!

NoMoreNicksLeft 3y ago

If we wrote software to do this, but we were so incompetent that we couldn't fill in the model with correct data, we might just say "who gives a fuck, fill that with random garbage and we'll fix it in a later version". And then we never do. Your subjective experience is that incompetent model. Your model doesn't know how to correctly judge human character, so you misread people and always wonder why they say one thing but another is true, and it doesn't click that they're lying the whole time. You can't keep track of time because the internal clock just isn't implemented, so the who day seems to drag on, or maybe fly by too quickly. It's all just really shitty software. Layers upon layers. And because humans believe this to be some mystical thing, rather than trying to fix it from the inside, they assume that it's awesome, necessary, and why would anyone want to fix it? No small fraction of it is simply because our memory is faulty. The only time you ever remember anything is the first time you remember it, every memory access of that is really you remembering the last time you remembered it. Each access is lossier than the last, and confabulation is guaranteed. This seems to be true even moments after the event. If it was anyone other than evolution who wrote your code, you could sue them for criminal negligence. And that's before we even get to the part where you find out you're not even you. Inside your skull is another being, an intelligent one, with desires and goals. But you can't see, hear, or feel this being. It's invisible. The "you" that I'm talking to, exists because this being once upon a time needed to simulate the other humans around him, so he could anticipate them well enough to not be out-competed. He has a pretty good idea what they'd say if he asked them questions, how they'd respond to threats and challenges, what sets them off (so he can avoid fights). And, by mistake or design, he used this simulator to simulate himself (maybe to bootstrap it? if the simulation's output matches his known answers, it's working correctly?). You're the simulation. When the judge asks the psycho teenager why he put the cat in the microwave and he says "I dunno" he's telling the truth. He does not know why. When your girlfriend cheats on you, and she's crying hysterically and can't tell you why she did it, she's not just lying (either to hurt you or to spare feelings)... she doesn't know. It was that other being in their skulls doing these things. They're just the simulations. Now, you've either been poking around in your own head, seeing little glimpses of what I'm talking about, making you wonder if I'm not on to something, or you're incapable of that. I've met both kinds of people. If you're the former, you're wondering just how much of it I understand, because some of the glimpses paint a slightly different picture from what I describe. That's because our minds weren't built the same way. No two are alike, not in a special snowflake way, but instead like no two shacks in shantytown have the same kind of leaky cardboard roofs. And, if you're the latter...

postmodest 3y ago

Have you ever been under anesthesia like propofol? I feel like most of what we call "consciousness" is converting short term memory into selected long-term memory, facilitated by language. Because then you're under, you can even be "interactive" but you're not conscious of it because your short term memory has been disabled. As to "human intelligence", honestly, I think that human languages that let us convert our "consciousness" into a shared hallucination is the key evolutionary advantage. Human intelligence comprises a hive mind in a sense, that our experience of the world is hugely affected by the shared social experience where language transfers memory from person to person.

kozd 3y ago
But why should it be like something to convert short term memory to long term memory? Computational systems can convert data between different forms of memory but we don't typically believe consciousness emerges from this operation.
- selecsosi 3y ago
  Not to say this addresses the concern but in that case a computation system is being driven by a pure line signal (the power) and is ultimately both dependant on that for operation, and requires a high level of stability of that line to be "effective". The alternative in this case is imagining that you have a biological process that has adaptive energy response controlling the movement from short term, to long term and itself optimizing based on the performance trade-off of input stimulus overload. In that case, the process of deciding what to, and when to move data from short term to long term memory (in a feedback loop) could start to approach more of the appearance of consciousness (choosing what to process, what to remember, adjusting the input rate and types of input based on the limitations of processing and retention). Many animals have consciousness as well so I think it's important to be more open to reducing the bare essentials of what a process of "awareness" is or could be rather than looking at it from a hyper evolved language/information influenced state of humans. Note I agree that it is not consciousness, but i think it's an interesting exploration to look at the modeling of it from computer forms since we are made of non-conscious atoms and still made it here

ambrozk 3y ago

> So in short: I cannot understand what is the actual substance of subjective experience. This problem just goes away if you assume that there is no dividing line between the "experience" of you and the "experience" of any other computational system. Actually try to think, what does a computer "experience"? An atom? What does it feel like to be a standing desk?

odyssey7 3y ago
Panpsychism is going mainstream again.
- ambrozk 3y ago
  It seems like the only solution that's compatible with materialism. If you accept that it "feels like something" to be you, and you accept that your intelligence is just a computational process which differs from others only in the specific computations involved (as I think you should, especially in the age of LLMs), then you must infer that it "feels like something" to be any number of computational processes. If you infer otherwise, you're positing that there's an unmotivated, invisible, in-kind difference between human intelligence and all other physical phenomena which seem to mirror its abilities. The conclusion I come to, which doesn't actually seem that strange, is that what's special about our experience is the complexity of our thought, our ability to turn extremely high-dimensional raw experience into low-dimensional models of reality, our ability to maintain a sense of mostly-stable identity over a long period of time, our capacity for emotion and sensation. It may "feel like something" to be a rock or a standing desk, but it isn't a very interesting or complicated feeling.
  - odyssey7 3y ago
    If we take the behavior of matter as the observable signs of how it feels — this is true if sensation motivates action — then many rich states of sensation have been observed in subatomic particles. The computational process of an organism is evolved to operate the organism, toward survival of the species. I don’t think these sensations would necessarily be more complex than those of subatomic particles, but they would need to be directed by the system to represent the state of the system and the observed environment, to link to actions the system could take, and to bias actions toward survival of the system.

andoando 3y ago

What makes sense to me is that consciousness is not an emergent property but a core of all things, with the additional property that is replicative/additive. That is smaller consciousness's can form larger consciousness's. As to what it is, or why it exists at all, I don't think there will ever be answer to that. It just is. Its definitely a strange thought, but it seems more likely to me than neurons or whatever other brain matter somehow produce consciousness out of thin air as soon as they some level of composition. Pure materialism also seems very ill defined to me. The physical world is after all only observable/detectable/can be studied upon, through conscious experience. At best we can say what is real is what is universally agreed upon by all observing conscious agents. If hypothetically there were only two of us, and I said "There is no ball in front of us" and you said "There is", then what is the meaning of physical true/reality? You can say lets use a detector. But then again, if I experienced the detector as saying false and you said its true, what do we do? It seems unavoidable that reality is a part of conscious experience, and not the other way around.