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Apologies if this is a dumb question or a taboo question or both, but what the does “conscious” mean? We know about lots of complex systems, and systems that e

Apologies if this is a dumb question or a taboo question or both, but what the does “conscious” mean? We know about lots of complex systems, and systems that exhibit “emergent” behaviors seeming much more complex and goal-directed than the components of the system (the glider gun, that thing with the computer-modeled birds with like 3 simple rules but then the whole flock does complicated, creative stuff, long list). Because I don’t think I’ve ever heard someone call a virus conscious, or a fire (until this submission I guess) and both of those things consume energy in one way or another, reproduce, avoid obstacles, adapt to situations to reproduce more. Ok so maybe it’s bacteria, or maybe it’s spiders, or maybe it’s dolphins, or maybe it’s primates, and then abruptly it’s “yup, humans for sure, that’s the one thing everyone agrees on, humans are conscious”. But is a fertilized human egg conscious, or a fetus at one trimester, or two, or three, or birth? That seems pretty controversial. Doesn’t this all seem a bit pre-Copernican? It’s like the “Copenhagen Interpretation” of wave function “collapse” via Born amplitudes: if you just give up on trying to force subjective human experience onto hard data and sound math, abruptly there’s nothing really very controversial going on other than some deep, personal introspection about subjective experience. I regard myself as a spiritual person in the sense that I wonder about my own subjective experience and the existence of some greater plane of reality and the possibility of a creator or deity, that seems to be a fairly common if not borderline ubiquitous thing people describe, but it’s not transferable, and it feels like the goalposts on consciousness are just a bunch of post-facto efforts to rationalize why this observable trait of other people likewise describing some subjective experience into science. If describing a subjective experience in compelling natural language is an indicator of consciousness then my MacBook is conscious. I feel like I’m missing something here.

roywiggins 3y ago
> Because I don’t think I’ve ever heard someone call a virus conscious Panpsychism posits that all matter is conscious, and perhaps consciousness is more fundamental than matter. I don't find it particularly persuasive, but it's a real philosophical position: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/panpsychism/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/panpsychism/
- __MatrixMan__ 3y ago
  Panpsychist here, much of the time at least. It sort of sneaked up on me. It was initially a physics inquiry. I was playing with the idea that there is not "the" arrow of time, but instead "my" arrow of time, something arising from my biochemistry maybe. Under this lens, the obvious candidates for consciousness are the ones whose arrows of time are all pointing in the same direction--because I can communicate with them (this is why most humans believe that humans are conscious). The things that seem not to be conscious: lightning strikes, rocks, etc. these may just be the machinations of someone whose arrow of time is orthogonal to my own. Their future is my... left, or whatever (btw if you think this is a fun concept, you might enjoy the book "A Clockwork Rocket," which is about time and space, not consciousness). I have no evidence that these things in fact are conscious, but I also have no evidence that they are not. But it's not just academic, I'll behave differently depending on how I chose: - On the one hand you've got kooky behavior like listening to a waterfall and wondering what it's thinking. - On the other hand you've got this loneliness and the idea that it can be solved with rocket ships or telescopes and the possibility that you'll overlook life right under your nose because you're too busy looking for something that looks like yourself. Me? I'll take the waterfall.
  - DEADMINCE 3y ago
    > I was playing with the idea that there is not "the" arrow of time, but instead "my" arrow of time, something arising from my biochemistry maybe. > Under this lens, the obvious candidates for consciousness are the ones whose arrows of time are all pointing in the same direction--because I can communicate with them (this is why most humans believe that humans are conscious). None of this follows for me. If a being has its own arrow of time surely it would be based on decisions it would make, and conscious beings would not all have their time arrows pointed in the same direction simply because they were conscious.
    - __MatrixMan__ 3y ago
      Sorry, what I mean is that if you and some other being happen to have parallel time arrows, then it's possible that you'll recognize them as conscious. They might have similar thermodynamic properties to yourself, for instance. If you prod at them, they squeal afterwards. That sort of thing. If you encounter one with an orthogonal time arrow, you're not going to be able to communicate with them. You're not going to have evidence that can identify them as separate from any other phenomena. This unknowability turns it into a choice, not a deduction. From there you've got to decide whether you'd rather assume something is conscious when it's not, or whether you'd rather assume something's not when it is. I find the latter more troubling.
roenxi 3y ago
You've hit on the root of the debate, but you might have missed it. The debate is to define the meaning of consciousness. We've got a general problem of not knowing what consciousness is, if it actually exists, how many people have it, if it is exclusive to humans and not really having a good philosophical grounding for (assuming multiple separate consciousnesses could exist) whether in practice that is the case of if the universe only have one big super-contagiousness that happens to be well partitioned. Also what is the nature of time as a bonus, because that one is quite gnarly and has lots of implications for the other questions - there arer lots of things about time that could be true but we would be unable to perceive. Once you have answered all those questions to taste, you are now prepared to engage in unending argument with people who picked any alternate combination of answers.
- benreesman 3y ago
  Is there some particular reason why this debate isn’t squarely in the spiritual/religious/personal/subjective building on campus and zero in the science building? I mean, these are all fascinating questions in a “let’s smoke a joint and talk about the meaning of life” sense, I’ve had many such conversations (both with and without the joint) and enjoyed all of them that were of that tenor. And I can see there being a building on campus between the other two where the topic is ethics and morality: how rigorous can we be about what constitutes acceptable behavior, compassionate behavior, empathetic behavior, kindness and decency. Those things seem much more amenable to some level of rigor: I certainly hope that some version of those ideas can be rigorous enough to admit a consensus, but that seems like a way more realistic goal than defining consciousness. It still poses hard questions: is it ok to eat animals? That’s controversial but seems at least in principle amenable to scientific study of apparent pain or suffering and strategies for minimizing or eliminating it entirely. I have a sinking suspicion that the real definition of “conscious” is “seems a lot like me”.
  - knightoffaith 3y ago
    You might be being facetious, but just in case - academic philosophers generally aren't in the business of smoking joints while talking about the meaning of life, or anything like this (even without the joint). They're generally focused on making principled arguments for views, including views on consciousness. And the debate is primarily a philosophical debate, not a scientific debate, if that's what you're asking. And I'm not sure that ethics is particularly more "scientific" than philosophy of mind. There's a case to be made that scientific study of pain is relevant to the morality of eating animals, yes, but there's also a case to be made that science is relevant to consciousness, e.g. the science related to IIT. And in both cases, the science is relevant but doesn't even come close to solving the issue.
mdavidn 3y ago
Sam Harris likes to say that consciousness is “what it’s like to be.” This has always seemed to me a pointless tautology.
- binary132 3y ago
  Sounds like a super reductive panpsychism I think we can all agree that rocks don’t have subjective aesthesia
luqtas 3y ago
[dead]
DEADMINCE 3y ago
> I feel like I’m missing something here. Maybe just overcomplicating things. Being 'conscious' really just means being sentient, having some sort of awareness and ability to sense and react to things. Then there is having a 'consciousness', which is more than just being conscious and generally refers to having some degree of self-awareness. Your macbook doesn't fit into either of these categories, and certainly isn't conscious. Nor is fire, or a virus.
ninetyninenine 3y ago
Yeah. The biggest thing most people miss is that the question your asking is in No way at all profound. You are asking an extremely mundane question that only appears profound as an illusion. What you are dealing with here is in actuality a language problem. You are contemplating and asking about the intricacies of a specific vocabulary word. It is an arbitrary sounding word with a simply arbitrarily vague definition surrounding it. Who cares? This is a linguistic problem not a philosophy problem. You think you're asking about something metaphysical or philosophical? No. It is a language quirk that's actually a trap. When you debate with someone about what is "consciousness" you have fallen into this trap. You believe you're discussing something profound, but no. What you are doing is debating about some arbitrary definition of some arbitrary word. When it goes into the details it's all about delineating what group of traits is conscious and what group of traits isn't conscious and this is not at all interesting. I think in reality this concept doesn't exist. We think it exists because the word exists. When you read this sentence you really need to think deeply about what I'm saying here. A lot of people miss it when I say the concept doesn't exist without the word. In fact, the word is so ingrained with their psyche they can't differentiate the two.
- knightoffaith 3y ago
  Daniel Dennett holds a view somewhat along these lines. See his famous paper, Quining Qualia: https://web-archive.southampton.ac.uk/cogprints.org/254/1/quinqual.htm https://web-archive.southampton.ac.uk/cogprints.org/254/1/qu...
- paulrudy 3y ago
  This point of view could be applied to any word, and the extreme result is that you'd negate meaningful or useful communication, or that someone would have to be the arbiter of what is a legitimate concept or not. Between vocabulary, commonly understood meaning, possible meaning, and actual personal experience, there are many detours and jumps. "Dog" as a word, concept/meaning, and experience, has these issues. What's not a dog, which dog are you thinking about, and does this apply to "dog" or just those specific dogs you've experienced? Etc. Words like "consciousness", for less concrete experiences than "dog", tend to have more fog in the gaps between word and shared meaning, and between those and individual experience. It seems like you're trying to flatten a person's curiosity about the implications of a shared concept or experience into a "mundane" phantasm about a word whose referent is either nonsensical or nonexistent to you. I think that the gaps between word, concept, and experience, while confusing and difficult, are worthy of more respect and wonder than to just flatten them as though their existence didn't imply something potentially important and essential is happening there. Language arose because we have actual experience to share, however tricky it can be to verbalize. It doesn't work perfectly, and leads to confusion, but here we are, reading and writing. "Consciousness" may be a word for a slippery concept/experience, but that doesn't equate to questions about consciousness being inherently semantic.
baxtr 3y ago
I thought the definition given in a sibling comment was interesting: > Consciousness is the constellation of your past experiences transforming reality into your next experience. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39860879 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39860879

roywiggins 3y ago

> Because I don’t think I’ve ever heard someone call a virus conscious Panpsychism posits that all matter is conscious, and perhaps consciousness is more fundamental than matter. I don't find it particularly persuasive, but it's a real philosophical position: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/panpsychism/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/panpsychism/

__MatrixMan__ 3y ago
Panpsychist here, much of the time at least. It sort of sneaked up on me. It was initially a physics inquiry. I was playing with the idea that there is not "the" arrow of time, but instead "my" arrow of time, something arising from my biochemistry maybe. Under this lens, the obvious candidates for consciousness are the ones whose arrows of time are all pointing in the same direction--because I can communicate with them (this is why most humans believe that humans are conscious). The things that seem not to be conscious: lightning strikes, rocks, etc. these may just be the machinations of someone whose arrow of time is orthogonal to my own. Their future is my... left, or whatever (btw if you think this is a fun concept, you might enjoy the book "A Clockwork Rocket," which is about time and space, not consciousness). I have no evidence that these things in fact are conscious, but I also have no evidence that they are not. But it's not just academic, I'll behave differently depending on how I chose: - On the one hand you've got kooky behavior like listening to a waterfall and wondering what it's thinking. - On the other hand you've got this loneliness and the idea that it can be solved with rocket ships or telescopes and the possibility that you'll overlook life right under your nose because you're too busy looking for something that looks like yourself. Me? I'll take the waterfall.
- DEADMINCE 3y ago
  > I was playing with the idea that there is not "the" arrow of time, but instead "my" arrow of time, something arising from my biochemistry maybe. > Under this lens, the obvious candidates for consciousness are the ones whose arrows of time are all pointing in the same direction--because I can communicate with them (this is why most humans believe that humans are conscious). None of this follows for me. If a being has its own arrow of time surely it would be based on decisions it would make, and conscious beings would not all have their time arrows pointed in the same direction simply because they were conscious.
  - __MatrixMan__ 3y ago
    Sorry, what I mean is that if you and some other being happen to have parallel time arrows, then it's possible that you'll recognize them as conscious. They might have similar thermodynamic properties to yourself, for instance. If you prod at them, they squeal afterwards. That sort of thing. If you encounter one with an orthogonal time arrow, you're not going to be able to communicate with them. You're not going to have evidence that can identify them as separate from any other phenomena. This unknowability turns it into a choice, not a deduction. From there you've got to decide whether you'd rather assume something is conscious when it's not, or whether you'd rather assume something's not when it is. I find the latter more troubling.

roenxi 3y ago

You've hit on the root of the debate, but you might have missed it. The debate is to define the meaning of consciousness. We've got a general problem of not knowing what consciousness is, if it actually exists, how many people have it, if it is exclusive to humans and not really having a good philosophical grounding for (assuming multiple separate consciousnesses could exist) whether in practice that is the case of if the universe only have one big super-contagiousness that happens to be well partitioned. Also what is the nature of time as a bonus, because that one is quite gnarly and has lots of implications for the other questions - there arer lots of things about time that could be true but we would be unable to perceive. Once you have answered all those questions to taste, you are now prepared to engage in unending argument with people who picked any alternate combination of answers.

benreesman 3y ago
Is there some particular reason why this debate isn’t squarely in the spiritual/religious/personal/subjective building on campus and zero in the science building? I mean, these are all fascinating questions in a “let’s smoke a joint and talk about the meaning of life” sense, I’ve had many such conversations (both with and without the joint) and enjoyed all of them that were of that tenor. And I can see there being a building on campus between the other two where the topic is ethics and morality: how rigorous can we be about what constitutes acceptable behavior, compassionate behavior, empathetic behavior, kindness and decency. Those things seem much more amenable to some level of rigor: I certainly hope that some version of those ideas can be rigorous enough to admit a consensus, but that seems like a way more realistic goal than defining consciousness. It still poses hard questions: is it ok to eat animals? That’s controversial but seems at least in principle amenable to scientific study of apparent pain or suffering and strategies for minimizing or eliminating it entirely. I have a sinking suspicion that the real definition of “conscious” is “seems a lot like me”.
- knightoffaith 3y ago
  You might be being facetious, but just in case - academic philosophers generally aren't in the business of smoking joints while talking about the meaning of life, or anything like this (even without the joint). They're generally focused on making principled arguments for views, including views on consciousness. And the debate is primarily a philosophical debate, not a scientific debate, if that's what you're asking. And I'm not sure that ethics is particularly more "scientific" than philosophy of mind. There's a case to be made that scientific study of pain is relevant to the morality of eating animals, yes, but there's also a case to be made that science is relevant to consciousness, e.g. the science related to IIT. And in both cases, the science is relevant but doesn't even come close to solving the issue.

mdavidn 3y ago

Sam Harris likes to say that consciousness is “what it’s like to be.” This has always seemed to me a pointless tautology.

binary132 3y ago
Sounds like a super reductive panpsychism I think we can all agree that rocks don’t have subjective aesthesia

luqtas 3y ago

[dead]

DEADMINCE 3y ago

> I feel like I’m missing something here. Maybe just overcomplicating things. Being 'conscious' really just means being sentient, having some sort of awareness and ability to sense and react to things. Then there is having a 'consciousness', which is more than just being conscious and generally refers to having some degree of self-awareness. Your macbook doesn't fit into either of these categories, and certainly isn't conscious. Nor is fire, or a virus.

ninetyninenine 3y ago

Yeah. The biggest thing most people miss is that the question your asking is in No way at all profound. You are asking an extremely mundane question that only appears profound as an illusion. What you are dealing with here is in actuality a language problem. You are contemplating and asking about the intricacies of a specific vocabulary word. It is an arbitrary sounding word with a simply arbitrarily vague definition surrounding it. Who cares? This is a linguistic problem not a philosophy problem. You think you're asking about something metaphysical or philosophical? No. It is a language quirk that's actually a trap. When you debate with someone about what is "consciousness" you have fallen into this trap. You believe you're discussing something profound, but no. What you are doing is debating about some arbitrary definition of some arbitrary word. When it goes into the details it's all about delineating what group of traits is conscious and what group of traits isn't conscious and this is not at all interesting. I think in reality this concept doesn't exist. We think it exists because the word exists. When you read this sentence you really need to think deeply about what I'm saying here. A lot of people miss it when I say the concept doesn't exist without the word. In fact, the word is so ingrained with their psyche they can't differentiate the two.

knightoffaith 3y ago
Daniel Dennett holds a view somewhat along these lines. See his famous paper, Quining Qualia: https://web-archive.southampton.ac.uk/cogprints.org/254/1/quinqual.htm https://web-archive.southampton.ac.uk/cogprints.org/254/1/qu...
paulrudy 3y ago
This point of view could be applied to any word, and the extreme result is that you'd negate meaningful or useful communication, or that someone would have to be the arbiter of what is a legitimate concept or not. Between vocabulary, commonly understood meaning, possible meaning, and actual personal experience, there are many detours and jumps. "Dog" as a word, concept/meaning, and experience, has these issues. What's not a dog, which dog are you thinking about, and does this apply to "dog" or just those specific dogs you've experienced? Etc. Words like "consciousness", for less concrete experiences than "dog", tend to have more fog in the gaps between word and shared meaning, and between those and individual experience. It seems like you're trying to flatten a person's curiosity about the implications of a shared concept or experience into a "mundane" phantasm about a word whose referent is either nonsensical or nonexistent to you. I think that the gaps between word, concept, and experience, while confusing and difficult, are worthy of more respect and wonder than to just flatten them as though their existence didn't imply something potentially important and essential is happening there. Language arose because we have actual experience to share, however tricky it can be to verbalize. It doesn't work perfectly, and leads to confusion, but here we are, reading and writing. "Consciousness" may be a word for a slippery concept/experience, but that doesn't equate to questions about consciousness being inherently semantic.

baxtr 3y ago

I thought the definition given in a sibling comment was interesting: > Consciousness is the constellation of your past experiences transforming reality into your next experience. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39860879 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39860879