5 ms·

How does this explain away the mystery of consciousness?

patcon 2y ago
One take: Chasing the Rainbow: The Non-conscious Nature of Being (2017) https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.01924/full https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.0192... You might get a kick out of this paper (though some may find it's proposal a bit bleak, I think there's a way to integrate it without losing any of the sense of wonder of the experience of being alive :) ) It analogizes conscious experience to the a rainbow "which accompanies physical processes in the atmosphere but exerts no influence over them". > Though it is an end-product created by non-conscious executive systems, the personal narrative serves the powerful evolutionary function of enabling individuals to communicate (externally broadcast) the contents of internal broadcasting. This in turn allows recipients to generate potentially adaptive strategies, such as predicting the behavior of others and underlies the development of social and cultural structures, that promote species survival. Consequently, it is the capacity to communicate to others the contents of the personal narrative that confers an evolutionary advantage—not the experience of consciousness (personal awareness) itself.
- smokedetector1 2y ago
  I find these types of arguments very odd, though at one point in my life I would certainly have endorsed them. What is it about the modern scientific mindset that makes people say "actually, the ubiquitous experience of being alive, having thoughts, feelings, and making choices, is actually 100% an illusion." Don't get me wrong, obviously there is interaction between evolutionary functions, the brain, etc - I mean, there's anesthesia, there's being drunk, horny, fight or flight.. there's all sorts of ways that it's obvious there's a link. But why do so many theorists want to go from "there's a link" to "this is 100% an illusion?" I just don't get it. Is it that uncomfortable to have something that is outside the reach of physical systems theorizing, or something that is unexplainable (i.e., the link) that we'd rather fit reality into the theory than the other way around? We have to have the courage to live with something that is inexplicable, at least for now (and, honestly, maybe forever), rather than lose faith in our own existence.
082349872349872 2y ago
Consciousness is just the result of a search for "a more or less linear story that makes sense of the way I act and react" We're good at predicting states of minds of others (helpful when trying to exploit limited resources, and very helpful for either predator or prey), and we can cheaply gather a lot of data on ourselves, so why should the capability for inferring states of mind not, as a side effect, also provide us with our own inferred state of mind: our own "I"?
- smokedetector1 2y ago
  This is a theory that would work, except for the fact that I know I exist. Why does materialism so desperately want to ignore that knowledge? Is that really simpler than the idea that we have a soul that interacts with the body and brain, but which also has its own nature that is separate from biology and evolution? Do we have to go 100% and say things that start with "consciousness is just"? I'm passionate about this because I know -- from personal experience -- that this type of philosophy can really go along with denying ones own existence in a deep way. It feels great to know you're a soul that exists. I don't know why it's supposed to be "rational" to convince yourself against a simple truth that we all know intuitively. And I say that as someone who used to feel that way.
  - 082349872349872 2y ago
    The quality of consciousness and the existence of a non-body non-brain soul seem to me like two completely orthogonal issues (I can easily imagine creatures without conscious awareness but with a soul; I can certainly imagine creatures with brain-driven consciousness but without a soul; a rock has neither; in your model people have both) so it seems unlikely that answering your two questions would move the conversation forward. For what it's worth, I know I exist as well; can we agree that we both exist, but we have differing models for what the necessary constituents of that existence are?
    - smokedetector1 2y ago
      > Can we agree that we both exist, but we have differing models for what the necessary constituents of that existence are? Of course, yes. > I can certainly imagine creatures with brain-driven consciousness but without a soul This would probably be the heart of the disagreement. I don't believe this is possible. Such a creature would not have qualia. And, as a species, I don't think we're any closer to resolving this question "objectively" than we ever were. fMRIs say where blood is flowing in the brain, but that's hardly enough to explain the phenomenon of subjective experience. By the nature of the question, we won't be able to attack it from the outside, and I don't think I could generally convince another person that they have a soul that exists, if they're inclined to explain themselves using materialism, which at this point has become flexible enough to be unfalsifiable, with the everlasting faith that someday science will fill in all the gaps. That's why my approach now is just to poke holes in the seemingly impenetrable confidence that materialism is the only "rational" way to think. (By the way, I'm not saying you hold that position.)
visarga 2y ago
We have a dual search loop - outside, we act using our experience to gain new data. Inside, we compress this data and update our experience. We search for experience and search for understanding. Acting is search for new insights, learning is search for error minimization. I think the way we encode our experiences is relationally, like neural networks. We relate new experiences against past experiences, this creates a semantic space that is highly dimensional. Any concept is a point or a region in this space. It has consistent semantics, which leads to the unified experience. We can relate anything to anything in this space without having a central understander. Encoding your own experiences creates a first person perspective from 3rd person data, which was always a "hard" problem to explain in philosophy. The serial action bottleneck adds to the illusion of centralization. But it's still a distributed process, no neuron is conscious or understands by itself. And even in society, no human can recreate even a 1% of human culture individually. We are not that smart on our own. We should always look for the larger context where we develop, not just the brain. Search has the virtue of not hiding the environment, it is social and distributed, unlike more personal concepts like consciousness, intelligence and understanding. But as I said above, even inside the brain there is nothing but distributed processing, no homunculus. I think the core of my argument is "there is no centralized consciousness, understanding or intelligence, they are distributed processes, they act across neurons in the brain and across people in society". It seems like a hard pill to swallow, if that is true then there is also no centralized understanding or truth.
- smokedetector1 2y ago
  I commend your diligence, your theory may even be internally consistent, but I don't see why I should believe this rather than the comparatively simple and intuitively true (to me, anyway) notion that there is a genuine soul, it has its own volition, and it certainly interacts with the physical body and brain through a link that is currently (and may always be) mysterious.
  - visarga 2y ago
    What you say that the soul acts like a homunculus, "interacts with the physical body and brain through a link that is currently mysterious". It is a "center" thing that has volition, and semantics, and is genuine. And it is understandable to do so. It certainly feels unified, and genuine. And it is simple and nice to be so. But intuition fails us hard when it comes to introspection. We feel alive, and conscious, but we are a few billion neurons connected by trillion branches, all wrapped in a bio-robot, put inside a complex environment full of living things in a state of cooperation and competition.

One take: Chasing the Rainbow: The Non-conscious Nature of Being (2017) https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.01924/full https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.0192... You might get a kick out of this paper (though some may find it's proposal a bit bleak, I think there's a way to integrate it without losing any of the sense of wonder of the experience of being alive :) ) It analogizes conscious experience to the a rainbow "which accompanies physical processes in the atmosphere but exerts no influence over them". > Though it is an end-product created by non-conscious executive systems, the personal narrative serves the powerful evolutionary function of enabling individuals to communicate (externally broadcast) the contents of internal broadcasting. This in turn allows recipients to generate potentially adaptive strategies, such as predicting the behavior of others and underlies the development of social and cultural structures, that promote species survival. Consequently, it is the capacity to communicate to others the contents of the personal narrative that confers an evolutionary advantage—not the experience of consciousness (personal awareness) itself.

smokedetector1 2y ago
I find these types of arguments very odd, though at one point in my life I would certainly have endorsed them. What is it about the modern scientific mindset that makes people say "actually, the ubiquitous experience of being alive, having thoughts, feelings, and making choices, is actually 100% an illusion." Don't get me wrong, obviously there is interaction between evolutionary functions, the brain, etc - I mean, there's anesthesia, there's being drunk, horny, fight or flight.. there's all sorts of ways that it's obvious there's a link. But why do so many theorists want to go from "there's a link" to "this is 100% an illusion?" I just don't get it. Is it that uncomfortable to have something that is outside the reach of physical systems theorizing, or something that is unexplainable (i.e., the link) that we'd rather fit reality into the theory than the other way around? We have to have the courage to live with something that is inexplicable, at least for now (and, honestly, maybe forever), rather than lose faith in our own existence.

082349872349872 2y ago

Consciousness is just the result of a search for "a more or less linear story that makes sense of the way I act and react" We're good at predicting states of minds of others (helpful when trying to exploit limited resources, and very helpful for either predator or prey), and we can cheaply gather a lot of data on ourselves, so why should the capability for inferring states of mind not, as a side effect, also provide us with our own inferred state of mind: our own "I"?

smokedetector1 2y ago
This is a theory that would work, except for the fact that I know I exist. Why does materialism so desperately want to ignore that knowledge? Is that really simpler than the idea that we have a soul that interacts with the body and brain, but which also has its own nature that is separate from biology and evolution? Do we have to go 100% and say things that start with "consciousness is just"? I'm passionate about this because I know -- from personal experience -- that this type of philosophy can really go along with denying ones own existence in a deep way. It feels great to know you're a soul that exists. I don't know why it's supposed to be "rational" to convince yourself against a simple truth that we all know intuitively. And I say that as someone who used to feel that way.
- 082349872349872 2y ago
  The quality of consciousness and the existence of a non-body non-brain soul seem to me like two completely orthogonal issues (I can easily imagine creatures without conscious awareness but with a soul; I can certainly imagine creatures with brain-driven consciousness but without a soul; a rock has neither; in your model people have both) so it seems unlikely that answering your two questions would move the conversation forward. For what it's worth, I know I exist as well; can we agree that we both exist, but we have differing models for what the necessary constituents of that existence are?
  - smokedetector1 2y ago
    > Can we agree that we both exist, but we have differing models for what the necessary constituents of that existence are? Of course, yes. > I can certainly imagine creatures with brain-driven consciousness but without a soul This would probably be the heart of the disagreement. I don't believe this is possible. Such a creature would not have qualia. And, as a species, I don't think we're any closer to resolving this question "objectively" than we ever were. fMRIs say where blood is flowing in the brain, but that's hardly enough to explain the phenomenon of subjective experience. By the nature of the question, we won't be able to attack it from the outside, and I don't think I could generally convince another person that they have a soul that exists, if they're inclined to explain themselves using materialism, which at this point has become flexible enough to be unfalsifiable, with the everlasting faith that someday science will fill in all the gaps. That's why my approach now is just to poke holes in the seemingly impenetrable confidence that materialism is the only "rational" way to think. (By the way, I'm not saying you hold that position.)

visarga 2y ago

We have a dual search loop - outside, we act using our experience to gain new data. Inside, we compress this data and update our experience. We search for experience and search for understanding. Acting is search for new insights, learning is search for error minimization. I think the way we encode our experiences is relationally, like neural networks. We relate new experiences against past experiences, this creates a semantic space that is highly dimensional. Any concept is a point or a region in this space. It has consistent semantics, which leads to the unified experience. We can relate anything to anything in this space without having a central understander. Encoding your own experiences creates a first person perspective from 3rd person data, which was always a "hard" problem to explain in philosophy. The serial action bottleneck adds to the illusion of centralization. But it's still a distributed process, no neuron is conscious or understands by itself. And even in society, no human can recreate even a 1% of human culture individually. We are not that smart on our own. We should always look for the larger context where we develop, not just the brain. Search has the virtue of not hiding the environment, it is social and distributed, unlike more personal concepts like consciousness, intelligence and understanding. But as I said above, even inside the brain there is nothing but distributed processing, no homunculus. I think the core of my argument is "there is no centralized consciousness, understanding or intelligence, they are distributed processes, they act across neurons in the brain and across people in society". It seems like a hard pill to swallow, if that is true then there is also no centralized understanding or truth.

smokedetector1 2y ago
I commend your diligence, your theory may even be internally consistent, but I don't see why I should believe this rather than the comparatively simple and intuitively true (to me, anyway) notion that there is a genuine soul, it has its own volition, and it certainly interacts with the physical body and brain through a link that is currently (and may always be) mysterious.
- visarga 2y ago
  What you say that the soul acts like a homunculus, "interacts with the physical body and brain through a link that is currently mysterious". It is a "center" thing that has volition, and semantics, and is genuine. And it is understandable to do so. It certainly feels unified, and genuine. And it is simple and nice to be so. But intuition fails us hard when it comes to introspection. We feel alive, and conscious, but we are a few billion neurons connected by trillion branches, all wrapped in a bio-robot, put inside a complex environment full of living things in a state of cooperation and competition.