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It is time to give up the dualism introduced by the debate on consciousness

• deleted 5mo ago
  [deleted]
• greygoo222 5mo ago
  Utterly asinine article that doesn't understand its own subject matter.
  • argee 5mo ago
    Agreed. > Then he declared that there is another distinct problem — why the brain’s behavior is accompanied by experience at all — which he christened the “hard” problem of consciousness. This is what the article is positioned against. > We have souls. We have an inner self. We can treat ourselves as transcendental subjects in the Kantian sense. Isn't this an equivalent declaration? I understand the desire to cling to such ideas (as the article itself propounds), but if you don't understand the underlying laws to a high enough degree I consider this equivalent to ancient Greeks sitting around saying "there is a double of our soul inside the mirror, WE HAVE SEEN IT". We know today there is absolutely nothing at all "inside" that mirror. How do we know all this qualia isn't just some sort of illusion, that we ACTUALLY experience something? Unfortunately, this article puts forth an intriguing promise and then completely fails to deliver.
    • smokedetector1 5mo ago
      > How do we know all this qualia isn't just some sort of illusion, that we ACTUALLY experience something? I know what it means to have an experience that is illusory. For example, a mirage, or a drug-induced hallucination. What doesn’t make sense to me is how it’s possible for it to be an illusion that anything is being experienced at all. An illusion is a type of experience, isn’t it? If the experience is illusory, then who/what is being deceived? (This is basically just Descartes “I think therefore I am”)
      • argee 5mo ago
        > What doesn’t make sense to me is how it’s possible for it to be an illusion that anything is being experienced at all. It might not make sense to you now, but that's because of what we know or what we think we know, today (hence my ancient Greeks analogue). Look at the Gazzaniga effect, people seamlessly make up an "experience" narrative out of absolutely nothing. Whatever experience was claimed there probably didn't exist prior to the point of questioning, and then was wholly manufactured. Thus, that particular experience was a fabrication. > If the experience is illusory, then who/what is being deceived? Why does there need to be a who/what being deceived for something to be an illusion? A mirror functions regardless of whether someone is there to pretend there is a soul in it. We come from a race that took two thousand years (after it was first proposed) to accept the brain as the seat of the mind, over the heart — just because the heart physically reacts in times of emotion, while the brain remains inert. Whatever the truth is, humanity probably won't know it until enough generations of the old guard indoctrinated in the old ideas have passed on.
        • smokedetector1 5mo ago
          Sorry, who make up an experience narrative?
          • Kbelicius 5mo ago
            Never heard of Gazzaniga before reading above comment, its quite fascinating. The brain, its left hemisphere, makes up the narrative.
            • smokedetector1 5mo ago
              Sorry my comment was unclear. My point is, the process of “making up a narrative” does seem to imply a subjective experience, doesnt it? My point is, the existence of the experiencer can’t be denied. Even if the experience itself is some kind of illusion, theres no coherent way to say that there is no entity having an experience. Every attempt to do so ends up implying the existence of an experiencer (the one having the illusion of experiencing)
  • Domenic_S 5mo ago
    > I fail to make sense of the claim that there is such an “explanatory gap.” It regards what we would understand if we were to understand something that we currently do not understand. Forgive the muddled question, but: How can we know now what we would understand if we were to understand something we do not currently understand? Rhetorical nonsense. If I'm a student about to take geometry for the first time, I can certainly have a sense of what I'll understand when I "understand something [I] do not currently understand". The explanatory gap, IIUC, is rather simple: we can't explain why neurons firing results in us feeling/experiencing the world. This doesn't seem controversial to me.
    • skirmish 5mo ago
      > we can't explain why neurons firing results in us feeling/experiencing the world Feelings/experiences are specific patterns of specific neurons activating. Why is that hard?
• vermilingua 5mo ago
  This is hard to take seriously, the argument this article makes against the hard problem is… that it’s not hard? There is very little in the way of argument here at all, actually; it’s simply a refutation that there is any division between biological function and subjective experience, with no evidence or novel perspective to provide it any weight. Ironically, I think this article serves as quite a strong defense of the hard problem, because it shows how hard it is to articulate or construct an argument against it at all.
  • hn_throwaway_99 5mo ago
    Agreed. I thought this article was awful and I want my time back from reading it. It feels like rage bait, and it worked, because it pissed me off. > That is, consciousness is hard to figure out for precisely the same reason thunderstorms are: not because we have evidence that it is not a natural phenomenon, but because it is a very complicated natural phenomenon. That's flat out bullshit, and it completely misses the point. I know thunderstorms are incredibly complicated, but there is nothing about them that seems "mystical" to me, if you will, because of that complexity. If you have a basic understanding of the underlying principles, it's not hard to see how a thunderstorm would arise out of that complexity. Consciousness feels completely different to me. That fact that the physical world can give rise to a core sense of self doesn't make any sense to me, and hand waving it away as "well, it's just more complicated" isn't actually an argument. My experience with ketamine therapy for mental issues only greater heightens this belief. I don't believe the "soul" needs to be completely independent from the physical world (and indeed, my ketamine experience where a relatively simple chemical greatly affected my personal sense of self and experience is proof enough to me that it's not independent) to believe there is "something else", whether it's related to quantum phenomena or some other "plane" or field we just haven't discovered yet, to believe that consciousness arises out of "complexity" of other phenomena we already understand.
    • thepasch 5mo ago
      That is a lot of anger to come out of what essentially boils down to "I don't believe/want to believe that complexity can cause subjective experience." And this bit: > I don't believe the "soul" needs to be completely independent from the physical world [...] to believe there is "something else", whether it's related to quantum phenomena or some other "plane" or field we just haven't discovered yet, to believe that consciousness arises out of "complexity" of other phenomena we already understand. right after > Consciousness feels completely different to me. That fact that the physical world can give rise to a core sense of self doesn't make any sense to me, and hand waving it away as "well, it's just more complicated" isn't actually an argument. So, what, "complexity isn't a sufficient explanation," and _also_ "it's perfectly reasonable to believe it's the result of processes we don't understand?" Every time this discussion comes up, people get _irrationally_ emotional about it. Which I think is, itself, very interesting data.
• solenoid0937 5mo ago
  Any argument that a "soul" exists or that consciousness does not arise from the physical world (eg our neurons) is literally unfalsifiable. It cannot be disproven in the same way you can't disprove the existence of God, and so arguing with people that believe in it is largely pointless.
  • aa-jv 5mo ago
    Argue with someone who gathered evidence scientifically to demonstrate that we really, really don't know what we're talking about when it comes to the human soul: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twenty_Cases_Suggestive_of_Reincarnation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twenty_Cases_Suggestive_of_Rei... EDIT: Downvote all you want, materialists, but reincarnation is the spanner in the works nobody wants to confront ..
    • solenoid0937 5mo ago
      Reincarnation just doesn't make sense when you consider the numbers. Why are more people being born today than yesterday? If you believe in reincarnation, for some reason brand new souls are spawning into existence. Why? How does reincarnation work for them?
      • aa-jv 5mo ago
        > Why are more people being born today than yesterday? Because souls split. Like rain and the ocean.
  • andoando 5mo ago
    Yet the mere fact that I am conscious is a greater truth than any of my perception of the "physical" world. Neither does pure materialism rest on falsifiable beliefs, in that I could claim nothing exists outside my conscious experience.
    • criddell 5mo ago
      Just as one can say the neocortex named itself, it's your brain declaring that it is conscious. If ten years from now your phone tells you it is conscious, would you believe it? What criteria would you use to decide?
• solveiga 5mo ago
  I don’t think consciousness exists, at least not in the way people talk about it. First, there’s no clear definition that everyone agrees on. Second, there’s no way to test whether something has it. Does a cow have it? A dog? A spider? If you can't test for it and even define it, how can you claim its real?
  • k33n 5mo ago
    It’s possible that you’re not conscious. So your subjective view may be correct for you. To those who are conscious, this argument doesn’t really matter, and the proof is simply in the pudding.
    • anon291 5mo ago
      No conscious person can know if another person is conscious. There is no 'sensation' of experiencing another conscious. Given how many people can and have been fooled by AI, this lack of ability to sense another consciousness is clear.
      • selcuka 5mo ago
        That's the basis of the p-zombies thought experiment discussed (and dismissed without any real arguments) in the article.
        • skirmish 5mo ago
          P-zombies cannot be argued about, if you reject their existence your opponent will call you a p-zombie (happened to Dennett).
          • selcuka 5mo ago
            It's a fair point, though. If one rejects a subjective experience without any doubt, the most plausible explanation is that they don't have that subjective experience. If I tell you that I see numbers as colours, and you say "that's not possible", I would assume that you don't have synesthesia [1]. I wouldn't doubt the fact that I have it [2]. Similarly, if some people argue that consciousness is not something like I describe, I would naturally assume that they don't experience it the same way as I do. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synesthesia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synesthesia [2] Someone I know has synesthesia. I don't have any way to confirm or deny that. All I can say is I don't have it.
• dtagames 5mo ago
  How exciting to see new writing from Carlos Rovelli! He's one of the few physicists and philosophers of science (ancient or modern) who steadfastly rejects a priori assumptions that rely on things other than our observations. He also echos the modern belief that observer and actor are two sides of the same quantum event. I highly recommend any and all of his books.
  • hackable_sand 5mo ago
    The Order of Time is on my reading list
  • hn_throwaway_99 5mo ago
    If his writing is like this article, I'll pass. And not because I disagree with his conclusions, but because I think he fundamentally misses the point in his description of the problem in the first place. I thought this comment, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48175409 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48175409 , does a better job of describing the problem space and what a potential solution could like than all the words that Rovelli wrote in his article.
    • dtagames 5mo ago
      One great thing about quantum physics it that is isn't solved. To paraphrase Feynman, if you think you understand it, you're wrong. Thus, it's worth exploring all these heavy hitter physics thinkers. You won't agree 100% with any of them but you might develop your own version of things by reading a lot of them.
      • hn_throwaway_99 5mo ago
        I really like your response, but it also can help explain why I really dislike this essay. I fully understand and appreciate that there are lots of things about quantum physics, and heck, the universe at large, that are unsolved and that we don't understand. I would actually expect that in order for us to understand consciousness better that we'll need to fill some of the gaps of the quantum world. The reason why I didn't like the article is that I felt like it's misrepresenting the problem, as the comment I linked described. I'll try to explain with an analogy: In the late 1800s before the discovery of quantum physics, many physicists felt that the physics of the universe was solved and fully understood - the universe was basically just like a set of billiard balls set in motion a long time ago, and the future position of all those balls could be known if their states were known in the past. In that "pre-quantum" world, people still understood that emergent behavior could arise from complexity (even just classical complexity). This article just felt really hand-wavy to me by arguing "complexity is enough". For example, if a similar article were written in 1899, but then later we discovered quantum physics and eventually had a good understanding of how consciousness can arise from quantum interactions, I suppose the author could state "See, I was right - just more complexity!" But it would totally miss the point that "the missing piece" was actually the discovery of quantum physics in the first place, not just more classical complexity. So I felt this article was strawmanning the problem to begin with. I don't have to believe in "magic" or "souls" or religion to believe that the tools we have to describe complex emergent phenomena are not sufficient to describe the subjective experience of consciousness, but Rovelli seems to be saying that "more complexity" is just the answer to everything.
• ekianjo 5mo ago
  Philosophers being philosophers and not advancing the discussion at all.
  • thesmtsolver2 5mo ago
    A lot of science and math and logic originated from philosophers posing questions and even coming up with answers (then those fields graduated out of philosophy) This is the standard blub programmer but in science. The blub physicists doesn't understand anything more complex or higher-level than his daily abstractions. https://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html https://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html
• zetalyrae 5mo ago
  The first point (analogizing the hard problem to the reaction to Darwinism) is a very common rhetorical move: an analogy and history of ideas, which is convincing to many people, but what does it prove? > A philosophical zombie would claim to know what subjective experience is; otherwise, it would be empirically distinguishable from a human. Chalmers’s point is that the existence of the hypothetical, irreducible consciousness of which he speaks is something we can be convinced of only by introspection. During introspection, physical processes in my brain convince me of my consciousness. The same would theoretically happen in the zombie brain, convincing it of having consciousness as well. And this is why illusionism is not a satisfactory explanation. "Convincing it". Who is being convinced? Who is experiencing this? Imagine the easy problem of consciousness is solved: we understand the brain at every scale, from ion channels up. We can draw up a complete account, at every level of abstraction, of what goes on in the brain when you see and "apple" and say apple, and trace the signals across the optic nerve, map those signals to high-level mental representations, explain how those symbols become trees in a production rule which become words which the motor cortex coordinates into speech, etc. We can map every "pixel" of the visual field at any time t. Now imagine you take this description and rewrite the labels consistently, and show it to an alien. And they see this very complex diagram of an information-processing machine and they're not sure what it's for. And they'd think it's as conscious as a calculator, or a water integrator, or a telephone network, or the futures market of the European Union. Either all the computation happens "in the dark", as in a calculator or an Excel spreadsheet or a slide rule or Factorio, in which case we are p-zombies and consciousness is an illusion, which contradicts every waking moment of our experience (since consciousness and experience is all that we have); or, everything is conscious, from brains to slide rules and spreadsheets, and that is incredibly, and also has a number of problems (e.g.: why aren't my neurons individually conscious? Why does consciousness stop at my skull, that is, why is the causality of signal-trains in neurons more "conscious" than phonons in the hydroxyapatite crystals in my skull?). That's the hard problem.
  • solveiga 5mo ago
    I think this hard problem has a simple answer that people just don’t like: consciousness is a powerful (and fundamental to our "calculator brain") illusion. And yes, a spreadsheet simulating every neuron in your brain would also simulate it. The fact that it’s difficult to conceptualize doesn’t mean it’s not the answer. Similar to how we struggle to intuit general relativity, or to imagine the pre–Big Bang state of the universe (or its non-existence), or to picture what it’s like to be dead. Our intuition simply isn’t equipped for these cases, period, and it pushes back hard against them. Consciousness belongs in that same category IMO Also, the emergence of a consciousness like illusion kinda follows from an evolutionary perspective. To survive, a "calculator" brain needs a model of the external world in order to predict how it will evolve and to act in ways that improve survival odds. Once such a model exists, it becomes almost inevitable that it also includes a model of the system itself, since the brain is also part of the world it is modeling and an agent within it. This self-referential loop is likely what we experience as "consciousness" and it becomes central to how we understand and navigate reality. If we accept this framing, many traditional paradoxes dissolve on their own. The problem stops being "hard" in substance and becomes hard only in terms of imagination.
• d--b 5mo ago
  Where we are, it is still a matter of belief. I do believe what the author claîms, but it’s not something that’s proven so far, so it can’t be imposed as fact. The main consequence to the “soul” being physical is that free will is an illusion. And many people can’t stand this idea. People want to believe they are more than a deterministic physical process. They want to believe the future is not already written. They’ll look for free will in what still stands : god or quantum uncertainty. God can’t be disproved, and quantum uncertainty leaves room for a kind of mystery, that’s appealing. But LLMs definitely do a convincing job at “faking consciousness”.
• selcuka 5mo ago
  > This contradicts everything we have learned about nature. It doesn't contradict anything. It simply means that there is a gap in our current understanding, which may (or may not [1]) be scientifically explained in the future. The default reflex of the opponents of "the hard question" (i.e. those who deny the existence of such a question) is to attach a religious or spiritualist meaning to it, which is far from the truth. It's a question that arises from scientific curiosity that we hope to answer one day. [1] The "may not" part does not imply that there is something magical or metaphysical about it. There are things that we may not ever answer, like "do parallel universes exist" or "was there another universe before the big bang".
  • orwin 5mo ago
    My position is that the qalia are simulated by our brains as an evolutionary response to "this organism has to recognize it's continuity and unity across space and time", and the more the brain is developed, the strongest this impression has to be. I'll admit my position was built not to explain the hard problem of consciousness, but to find a philosophical answers to animals and newborn reactions to the mirror test, but I found it satisfactory enough when I heard about the hard problem of consciousness. My main argument for it is not an attack, it's simply Hanlon's razor. If you find a simpler explanation that doesn't demand new understanding, I will listen to it, if you do not, you have to show me the simplest solution is wrong, and I'll go to the second simplest.
    • suddenlybananas 5mo ago
      How do we experience that though?
      • lostmsu 5mo ago
        The neural connections get rewired.
    • card_zero 5mo ago
      Hanlon's razor? That one is "never assume malice where stupidity will do". You want Occam's razor, or the word "parsimonious".
• Animats 5mo ago
  OK, dualism. Heard that before. The new hard problem: how do biological brains get so much done on such slow hardware? That's a real physics question. We're missing something.
  • altmanaltman 5mo ago
    Hey you give Nvidia a few million years to evolve their chips and just see what happens
  • anon291 5mo ago
    The brain is not slow?
    • Animats 5mo ago
      Measured signals seem to be at kilohertz, not gigahertz, speeds.
      • anon291 5mo ago
        Some of the state of the art AI chips have similar speeds
  • skirmish 5mo ago
    Massive parallel processing.
  • don_esteban 5mo ago
    a) massive parallelism (although the current AI HW is getting there) b) clever structure/organization (we are nowhere near close) c) it is still buggy as hell
  • djokkataja 5mo ago
    > get so much done Compared to what??
• freakyhere 5mo ago
  I stopped reading when the author said science is not great as they claim to to be because when my cycle breaks down, I call a mechanic not a particle accelerator.
• dabadabad00 5mo ago
  Comically wrong. Quantum holography will someday demonstrate an analog information capacity of the quantum domain far exceeding the spin disposition. Our minds use this domain by mass entanglement within our very own neurons. You don’t want to hear it, though our minds may entangle and an entire culture exists among us who can traverse and manipulate the consciousness of others. They are responsible for the “voices in our heads”, and these are related to a great deal of very unscientific activity in our world. All of that occult demonology you smarties scoff at yet plagues everyone embroiled in “power” is based upon this phenomena. We are not alone in our own minds, and more than a few of you will be forced to confront this at some point in your lives. Falsifiable? Theories, not existential reality are concerned with what minds may falsify. Science lags behind reality, not the other way around.
  • hn_throwaway_99 5mo ago
    As much as I disliked TFA, I disliked this comment, which is so arrogantly self-assured of its own 0-evidence theories, even more.
  • euroderf 5mo ago
    I was with you thru "mass entanglement". Each of us is a distributed network of quantum-interface nodes. But I'd be very careful about attributing specific describable phenomena to these networks.
• deleted 5mo ago
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• hackinthebochs 5mo ago
  I'm not sure where all this discussion about the hard problem is coming from suddenly, or why people continue to struggle to understand it. It's really very simple. The hard problem identifies the in principle difficulty in explaining phenomenal consciousness, something not definable in terms of structure and function, given only the explanatory resources of structure and function. It's like saying you can't explain facts about cats given only facts about dogs, they're just different categories of description. That's really all there is to it. Whether or not physicalism has any hope of succeeding depends on whether there is a further conceptual or explanatory insight that when added to the standard structure and function explanatory framework of science, will ultimately bridge the gap. Who knows what that might look like. It's certainly premature to render a verdict on the possibility of this. But it should be clear that a full explanation in physical terms will need some new conceptual ideas and so the problem of consciousness isn't merely a scientific problem that will dissolve in the face of more scientific data, but a philosophical problem at core.
  • zetalyrae 5mo ago
    Very well explained.
  • __patchbit__ 5mo ago
    A stylistically different perspective from the one couched places an intrinsic function in a mathematical space.
  • pontus 5mo ago
    Also consider the possibility that the people who argue against the hard problem of consciousness may, in fact, not be conscious. How could they ever understand the nuance of conscious experience and how it is fundamentally different from 'structure and function' if they don't have it? To them there is only the easy problem of consciousness. And, of course, if they disagree with me about this and want to claim that they are, in fact, conscious, I'm not sure they can do that because... well the hard problem of consciousness.
  • syllogism 5mo ago
    It comes up because people are mistakenly conflating consciousness with moral personhood. People want to be talking about whether AI suffers in a morally meaningful way. In non-human animals this debate is often centered around the question of whether the animal has conscious experience, because there's little doubt that much of the emotional and experiential systems are shared. The analogy goes wrong with AI, where definitions of "consciousness" would seem to apply in the sense that the model clearly has a category for itself in its world model, feeds back on its output, etc. However the analogy between how it works and anything we would recognise as emotion or suffering is extremely strained. The solution is to just focus on ths question of what we really mean when we think of morally relevant suffering. It's a much clearer question than "consciousness" and it sidesteps the problem.
• deyiao 5mo ago
  Humans do not have souls, nor do they possess free will in the traditional sense. What we call “consciousness” is merely a product of evolution, and also a tool shaped by evolution. In essence, consciousness is a complex information input-output system. When such a system reaches a certain level of complexity, it inevitably generates the concept of “I” as a way to simplify the processing of overwhelming information. Praise be to AI. In 2025, inspired by AI, I feel that I have finally built a complete and unified worldview. Are we living in a virtual illusion? Are there higher-dimensional rulers, gods, or immortals in the universe? What exactly are the human soul and consciousness? I feel that these questions now share a single coherent answer. What I have written here is my answer regarding the soul and consciousness.
  • nofriend 5mo ago
    > What we call “consciousness” is merely a product of evolution, and also a tool shaped by evolution. that's the easy problem
  • thin_carapace 5mo ago
    would you care to link together 'complex IO systems inevitably degenerate to seperating self from environment as part of optimizing calculations' and your three questions? it isnt immediately clear why the concept of self answers the idea of god.
  • selcuka 5mo ago
    What you explain is intelligence, which is the subject of the "easy question". Consciousness in this context is the existence of phenomenal, or first person experiences. The hard question doesn't argue that consciousness is not a product of evolution. It probably is. It's just a question because we don't have a good way of explaining how/why it occurs.
    • krackers 5mo ago
      >It's just a question because we don't have a good way of explaining how/why it occurs. It's that you can't even measure it, since the way it's defined as a subjective experience, no external measure could ever capture it. This is what gives rise to the p-zombie argument. To get rid of that you have to accept "functional qualia" as basically equivalent to qualia, which solves the p-zombie issue and resolves half of the hard problem. From there, explaining consciousness is no "harder" than explaining other scale-depedent phenomenon in complex systems like LLMs: still hard, but at least tractable with scientific measurements and experiments.
• thin_carapace 5mo ago
  the single part of this article i enjoyed was the question "How can we know now what we would understand if we were to understand something we do not currently understand?" things were obviously the work of god for millenia. now they are obviously the work of natural processes. i wonder what the next obvious answer will be. one may collapse the dualism dichotomy to two distinct possibilities. in both cases this existence is a subset of some larger existence (true because self implies other). the first case involves a hard boundary between existences (externally one may only only observe, therefore our existence collapses to pure solipsism). in the second case, the boundary between existences is permeable (one may interact with our existence externally, therefore our existence collapses to solipsism with the addition of brain in a jar). in both these cases soul can mean something different, but it can still be seen to exist, unless one insists on dogmatic adherence to the rules of any one system in particular.
• trane_project 5mo ago
  There is no hard problem of consciousness not because of the baffling arguments against it in this article, but because materialism is not true. This article and the entire description around the hard problem just shows the amount of mental gymnastics needed to deny what is front of everyone in every instant of their lives. Matter and mind are not the same and mind is not produced from matter. That there are correlates between the body of a sentient being and the content of their experience is common sense but not proof that their body is causing the very ability to experience anything. You would think that absolutely no progress being made on how dead matter somehow produces experience would make people question their assumptions. Instead you get people denying that they have a mind or just coping by thinking that if they map yet another correlation they will finally crack the code.
  • thepasch 5mo ago
    Explain psychedelics, then? Do psychedelics have access to this supposed "separate layer" that mind exists on over matter? If yes, how? If not, how can something that ostensibly only interacts with the matter have any effect on the mind? Can you explain any of this in a way that doesn't boil down to "it's magic and you just have to believe that it's happening because it is?"
    • trane_project 5mo ago
      What is there to explain about psychedelics? There is nothing special to them. They affect the bodily aggregates of a being and cause the contents of the experience to change. So does eating a donut. There is no contradiction with what I said because I already conceded that mind and matter are closely interlinked and that changes in the body affect the contents experienced by the mind. But the "hard" problem of consciousness has nothing to do with the contents of the experience, but with explaining how experiencing of any kind is produced by aggregates that themselves do not have any such experiences. The simple answer is that mind (experience, consciousness, whatever you wanna call it) is not produced by matter and is a completely different realm of reality. Maybe if science simply assumed that mind and matter are different things instead they would have made some progress. For once, the "hard" problem of consciousness would be revealed to not be problem at all. As for non-scientific proof that you have a mind, you can just observe that for yourself in every instant of your own personal experience. No magic involved. If people want to deny their own minds that is up to them.
• mightyham 5mo ago
  > It is because of the hundreds of years of astonishing and unexpected success of the sciences that have convincingly shown that apparent metaphysical gaps are never such. This has to be one of the most dumbfounding pseudo-philosophical sentences I've ever read. Metaphysics by definition is unfalsifiable and unscientific; it exists on a parallel plane from empiricism and is derived only through intuition, reason, and for the religious revelation. If this guy's claim for material consciousness simply rests on an intuitive argument from induction, it suffices as a counter argument to say "If I am mistaken, I am".
  • hackinthebochs 5mo ago
    There are a lot of problems with the article, but this isn't one of them. The history of science has been one of dispatching one irreducible "essence" after another. Essence meaning some essential property of a phenomena that defines it and distinguishes it from all other phenomena. Science is in the business of reducing these once seemingly irreducible essences to more basic structure and dynamics. The last hold out is consciousness. It's reasonable to think it will also fall eventually.
    • mightyham 5mo ago
      It absolutely is a problem with the article. Science deals with physical phenomena; metaphysics quite literally means beyond physics. It's ridiculous to say that consciousness is the last hold out, as if there aren't a million other unanswered questions about meaning, essenence, and experience. Here is a parallel argument for you. The history of science has been one discovery after another which leaves us with new, increasingly complex unanswered questions about phenomena. It is reasonable to think that if/when we reduce consciousness through science we will find that there are more increasingly complex unanswered metaphysical gaps.
      • hackinthebochs 5mo ago
        Reducing a complex phenomena to more basic structure and dynamics just is to eliminate any open metaphysical questions about that phenomena. That's why the big philosophical debates center around monism vs dualism rather than n-pluralism. Science has dispatched all other essences from mainstream consideration.
• Eisenstein 5mo ago
  With consciousness and AI multiple problems are being smuggled into a single question. 1. How do we determine consciousness? 2. How should we handle moral consideration of a non-biological system? The first question is a red herring. It cannot be answered. We need to focus on the second question.
• light_hue_1 5mo ago
  There's a simpler way to state this: the easy problem is to understand the computations of the brain while the hard problem is to understand what experience the thing doing the computations has. We understand everything a CNN or Transformer does, but we have no idea how to relate that to qualia. This may also be why we need to run endless tests and don't have a theory that let's us predict how well the network processes anything.
  • grumbel 5mo ago
    > the easy problem is to understand the computations of the brain while the hard problem is to understand what experience the thing doing the computations has. The problem with that common definition is that it doesn't make much sense. Every philosopher that ever talked or wrote about the hard problem and qualia did so with plain old physics, by moving their mouth or using their hands to move a pen or keyboard. You can, in theory, trace how those physical interactions happen, all the way down to the neurons. Meaning the reason why they talked about qualia boils down to plain old physics. There is no scenario where the easy problems are solved and the hard problem remain. For there to be a hard problem, the easy problems must be unsolvable, but then you don't need a hard problem, since the easy problems are already hard.
• enoeht 5mo ago
  Rays of Light going through a me Prism where the Brain and senses can inflict action.
• cindyllm 5mo ago
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• robwwilliams 5mo ago
  Good first step of demolishing (yet again) the phlogiston of the brain. Even Chalmers does not argue for the hard problem with any vigor today. Rovelli’s arguments were made a dozen times over by Dan Dennett, and made better. His critique of qualia is unsatisfying because it never reaches Einstein’s problem: what the heck is the physicist’s meaning and mechanism of this thing we call “Now”? Rovelli owes us that answer. He spent a decade telling us absolute time is not fundamental, no universal present, no master clock. Take the clock out of the universe and the Now gets harder, not easier: if there is no clock out there, what builds the one the organism plainly runs on? Answer that, then explain consciousness and qualia to the neurophilosophers. Now is probably a process built by asynchronous wetware to survive. Humberto Maturana said the mechanisms that construct it are atemporal. And yet here we all are, reaching for clocks and synchrony to explain the Now. The irony should not be lost on Rovelli. The neuroscience is in print already: Bickle et al., Eur J Neurosci 2025 (doi:10.1111/ejn.70074. interview with R. Williams) where the wall clock is named as neuroscience’s most tacit and least examined assumption.
• hackandthink 5mo ago
  Chalmers: “It is natural to hope that there will be a materialist solution to the hard problem and a reductive explanation of consciousness, just as there have been reductive explanations of many other phenomena in many other domains. But consciousness seems to resist materialist explanation in a way that other phenomena do not.” "A landscape of consciousness: Toward a taxonomy of explanations and implications" https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0079610723001128 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S007961072...
  • n4r9 5mo ago
    Thanks for the reference, that looks like a pretty thorough review. It seems to me that Chalmers already precludes the possibility of physical/materialist explanations with his claim, quoted in the first section: > There is a logically possible world physically identical to ours, in which the positive facts about consciousness in our world do not hold. This certainly doesn't feel obvious or intuitive to me. I would expect that someone with the same neuronal make-up will have the same experience.
    • hackandthink 5mo ago
      It is neither obvious nor intuitive. But it is logical possible that we all are Zombies. In my regard the weak link is our understanding of materialism. It is to simple minded. (though panpsychism sounds really crank)
      • n4r9 5mo ago
        No, I mean that the logical possibility itself is neither obvious nor intuitive. If you physically copied me atom by atom, every instinct in me says that the result has conscious experience. I'd need some serious convincing otherwise.
• Garlef 5mo ago
  I'm all in the "brains cause minds" camp. But isn't the main argument here "We accept explanation gaps already in many places, why not also for consciousness?"? My objection would then be that actually, that's not true. The real statement would be "In everyday life (including science), we accept explanation gaps already in many places" But this does not mean that we have to accept this particular instance of an explanation gap.
• venk12 5mo ago
  Philosophers have had these rifts(an similar lines of arguments) forever. From Plato vs Aristotle (300 to 400 BC) (idea of forms vs nicomachean), In India Adi Shankara (around 700 CE) vs Madhavacharya (1200 CE) (dualism vs non-dualism) - there is a common thread to all of these arguments. But eventually, for me it comes down to a statement J Krishnamurti made (& it makes the most sense to me): "The self is a problem that thought cannot solve"
  • yashasnadigsyn 5mo ago
    Adi Shankara follows non-dualism and Madhvacharya follows dualism. It is referenced reverse in your reply.
  • KingFelix 5mo ago
    I enjoyed Krishnamurti and David Bohms conversations, they were great.
• jwilliams 5mo ago
  Rovelli is arguing (I think) that we need to fundamentally view consciousness as a natural phenomenon - albeit one that is extremely complex and poorly understood. So we ditch the philosophical puzzle and focus on the reality we can perceive and reason on. The problem is that consciousness is a philosophical invention (and a slippery one at that). We're in the wrong frame. If you accept consciousness is a thing you end up in this weird tautological state - it's not special, but we've put it in a special category. If you view via a grounded, practical frame, you probably don't care about consciousness. The fact that it's undefinable is probably a major clue.
  • childintime 5mo ago
    Stephen Wolfram is fascinated with his discovery of computation at the heart of the universe. Life itself may be like that, emerging then noticing itself and that it is alive - has the property of life. Then when it's governed by a "soul", or perhaps better said, constrained by it, then our awareness is of what we can't otherwise see, the laws that govern us, inevitably from a 5th dimension, as we stand in the shadow of Plato's cave. When we discover "we are" we are realized and grateful, and our life ends up being worship. Then we witness the greater life around us follow a bedding of creation, a call to become one from the experience we are one. When we become we'll see Jesus' loving eyes that first saw, and called for by showing himself, what we'll then see.
    • exe34 5mo ago
      It's important to remember, when Stephen Wolfram says "I discovered...", he uses it in the sense that most people say "Today I learnt ...".
  • barrkel 5mo ago
    The problem isn't really consciousness, it's qualia. Specifically, pain and suffering. If we create a machine that is able to print on the terminal 'I feel pain', how do we know when to believe the machine is feeling pain? This isn't enough: echo "I feel pain" Is a very complicated set of matrix multiplications enough?
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• mrkeen 5mo ago
  > The false “hard problem of consciousness” assumes upfront that there exists a metaphysical gap between mind and body. Or a gap between my mind and the minds of the other commuters on this bus. There are 15 or so biological machines here, but only one of them is being experienced in bright sound and colour.
• Sankozi 5mo ago
  The biggest benefit of term "consciousness" is that when I see something like "LLMs are not conscious" I immediately know that the author doesn't know what he is talking about.
  • mangolie 5mo ago
    In that case the author is simply saying the LLM is a p zombie, why does he not know what he's talking about?
    • Sankozi 5mo ago
      They are saying something similar to "LLM has no soul", depending on context it might something insightful or (in technical/scientific context) they are making fool of themselves.
• saidnooneever 5mo ago
  consciousness is hard because it requires a special kind of belief. we humans believe a lot of things, but this one is difficult. all is one, and that one thing is all. everything contains gender. opposites are the same thing. these are all easy things that are hard to understand/believe. Dont pretend like you dont believe anything is step 1.
• colordrops 5mo ago
  These conversations drive me insane. There isn't even an clear or even consensus definition of consciousness, yet here we are all acting like we are talking about the same thing. "It's right there, don't you see it? That's consciousness! We just need to define what it is so we can figure out if it's real or not".
  • wowoc 5mo ago
    Thomas Nagel's definition of consciousness is pretty good: "an organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something that it is like to be that organism—something it is like for the organism."
    • etiam 5mo ago
      What do you find good about that?
      • namero999 5mo ago
        The like-ness properly capture in one go the first-person and the phenomenal aspects of consciousness.
• apex_sloth 5mo ago
  The main value of this article is this absolute gold mine of a comment section.
• aledevv 5mo ago
  > ..idea anticipated centuries ago by the philosopher Baruch Spinoza: that our Soul could be a phenomenon of the same basic nature as any other phenomenon in nature. Even the current Artificial Intelligence revolution is showing us that: what was thought to be purely immaterial and intangible, that is, human abstract Reasoning and Thoughts, are actually tangible, physical, and even machine-reproducible.
  • mort96 5mo ago
    Was reasoning thought to be immaterial and intangible..? By whom? Materialism has been alive and well for a long time from what I can tell
    • hackinthebochs 5mo ago
      Plato, for example
  • unparagoned 5mo ago
    In the original paper about the hard problem, Chalmers does say all that stuff is explainable by science or the easy problems.
  • namero999 5mo ago
    Cognition/intelligence is not consciousness. Information processing vs phenomenality. AI is intelligent (it's in the name) but not conscious.
• pyaamb 5mo ago
  we are caught between an evolutionary need to know that our existence is meaningful and a universe that seems indifferent.
• _under_scores_ 5mo ago
  I may be misunderstanding the article but doesnt the fact that all other science and understanding sits on a continuum of which consciousness has (to my understading) to real footing mean that the problem is dualitic by definition? Thats not to say that it can't be 'brought into the fold', it may well be, but until it is it has no other place that to sit outside.
• ben_w 5mo ago
  Copying what I said 9 days ago when this post first appeared but didn't catch enough attention and only got two replies including my own: > I fail to make sense of the claim that there is such an “explanatory gap.” This is essentially saying "I don't understand therefore you are wrong". > We do not need to explain why it looks red for the same reason that we do not have to explain why the animal that we call “cat” looks like a cat. Why should we have to explain why “red” looks red? We did in fact need this to get AI to recognise cats. If we wish to actually know if some AI is or is not conscious, and not simply re-hashing conversations ancient Greeks will probably have had as animism faded from their culture and they stopped believing in dryads and anima loci, then it needs to be testable *by something outside the intelligence being tested for conscious*. > Scientific knowledge is ultimately first-personal. The world is real, but any account of it can exist only from within it. Any knowledge is perspectival. Subjectivity is not mysterious Mysteriousness isn't the problem with subjectivity, lack of repeatability is. This is why we make instruments to measure things: my "about the size of a cat" is subjective and likely different from yours, while my "31.4 cm" is only going to differ from yours if one of us is surprisingly bad at using a ruler; my "pleasantly warm" may or may not be yours, but my "21.3 C" will only differ from yours if one of our thermometers has broken. The "hard problem of consciousness" is that we not only don't have a device to measure consciousness, but even worse than that we don't even know what its equivalent of a ruler or thermometer would do. (At least for this meaning of consciousness; there's at least 40, we can at least test for the presence or absence of the meaning that e.g. anesthesiologists care about, but that's not the hard problem).
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  • 4gotunameagain 5mo ago
    > We did in fact need this to get AI to recognise cats. I believe that this is simply because of the way we train ML, with labelled data. It is quite conceivable that we could get an ML model to recognise cats just by some form of multidimensional clustering of training data.
    • 5mo ago
• MrOrelliOReilly 5mo ago
  This article is pretty slim on details, but I agree with the general argument that dualism is unnecessary to explain phenomenal consciousness. The word "consciousness" has a lot of baggage, which causes us to mislabel cognition as consciousness. [1] This is why I really like using terms like "qualia" or _phenomenal_ consciousness to make explicit what we're talking about. I still don't like this new trend of dismissing the hard problem altogether. We really don't have an explanation of phenomenal consciousness—it might even require novel physics to explain! [2] I'd also like to point out that, though this might seem like a semantic argument, it has meaningful consequences for how we approach science and ethics. [3] For example, if we are physicalists and accept that phenomenal consciousness is a property of the world, what does this tell us about other unobservable properties of the world science may be missing? (Recall that we only know about phenomenal consciousness through our own experience of it; we cannot observe it in others) [1] https://write.ianwsperber.com/p/what-is-the-color-blue https://write.ianwsperber.com/p/what-is-the-color-blue [2] https://youtu.be/DI6Hu-DhQwE?si=RB3qkt6PZ62SVpx3&t=2493 https://youtu.be/DI6Hu-DhQwE?si=RB3qkt6PZ62SVpx3&t=2493 [3] https://write.ianwsperber.com/p/morality-without-consciousness https://write.ianwsperber.com/p/morality-without-consciousne...
  • semilin 5mo ago
    It felt very strange to me that the author construes belief in the hard problem as some sort of spiritual baggage from unempirical religious view. He seems to want to pit the "new understandings of reality developed over the last three centuries" _against_ the idea of phenomenal consciousness, which is just absurd to me. As far as I understand, it is far more rooted in German idealism and its Cartesian roots than in any sort of religious spirit. I'm almost convinced that those who deny the metaphysical (or, if you insist, the plausibly merely physical) force of qualia are philosophical zombies trying to persuade us against the existence of the most obviously true piece of knowledge we have! Or, more generously, they are so steeped in the premises of modern empirical science that they treat their fundamental phenomenal experience as so untrustworthy as to be disregarded, despite its actual necessity in employing those very premises. Poor, disregarded qualia! Oh that the scientists could see how much they owe to you.
• dcminter 5mo ago
  > can I believe my own conclusion of having this mysterious non-physical experience, knowing that if I were a zombie, I would be convinced of the same without actually having it? The point of the philosophical zombie is that they don't experience anything, nor do they convince themselves of anything. If they're "experiencing" or "convincing themselves" then they're not philosophical zombies by definition. We all (presumably, although I might wonder about the author) know that consciousness is a thing, we don't have anything like a rigid definition of it. Perhaps we never will, but this kind of hot air is unlikely to ever get us closer to understanding it. Tiresome article by someone just being contrary for the sake of having something to say.
  • xyzsparetimexyz 5mo ago
    Right. Its bad science to say that consciousness doesnt exist.
  • don_esteban 5mo ago
    > The point of the philosophical zombie is that they don't experience anything, nor do they convince themselves of anything. If they're "experiencing" or "convincing themselves" then they're not philosophical zombies by definition. The problem is: Implicitly presupposing the existence of philosophical zombies implies the duality gap. It might as well be that philosophical zombies are mental construct that cannot physically exist, simply because building one will imbue it with 'consciousness' (as, it being the physical copy/simulation, it will be able to simulate also the 'consciousness'), in turn making it non-zombie.
    • dcminter 5mo ago
      > The problem is: Implicitly presupposing the existence of philosophical zombies implies the duality gap. Sure, but if you're going to posit a philosophical zombie, don't posit one that has a rich inner life, experiences qualia, and is ridden with self-doubt FFS.
• jincongho 5mo ago
  The author is mixing two discussions: soul/body dualism and qualia (hard problem). It could be true that there's only physical body, but still have the qualia explanatory gap.
• usernametaken29 5mo ago
  The author should read up on embodied cognition. Their arguments have been discussed at length. It’s all old stuff really. Good stuff too. I don’t see how the article succinctly describes this or contributes otherwise
  • jdiaz5513 5mo ago
    Fully agree, and I am mildly disappointed to see nobody has brought up Maturana and Varela in this entire thread. The deeper layer is autopoiesis - the conceptual foundation authored by them that embodied/4E cognition builds on. They defined cognition as a necessary property of self-referencing, self-maintaining boundaries in an information-theoretic/topological sense, not bound to any specific physical process. This dissolves the dualism Rovelli targets in a way that pure materialist/eliminativist arguments don’t manage cleanly. Autopoiesis is fully physical (mathematically modelable, biologically grounded) but it locates consciousness in structural relationships and informational dynamics rather than a purely physical substrate. Thompson’s Mind in Life (2007) is the contemporary version, and Varela’s later work integrates phenomenology directly. I hold that it may be possible to use the toolkits of set/category/group/type theory to formalize these relationships. Would be a vastly different conversation thread here if this work was more well known.
• metalman 5mo ago
  blather. another example of weak blather of the weeeeeeee! I'm so full of words variety, that fails to interesting or memorable, like someone so high on mushrooms that they are claiming to be able to see there own ears, who if asked what consiousness is will give a similar answer, unless you ask how consiousness relates to rubber bands, which will get a similar answer with rubber band anologies.
• roysting 5mo ago
  Many gave that up a long time ago. Welcome to reality, “experts” and “PhDs”.
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• dainank 5mo ago
  I believe nature is all there is. If we could replicate a human brain several times, and make each 'human brain' receive the exact same input data (sounds, sights, smells e.t.c.) from the moment they 'exist' until the end of their lifetime, I truly think that each of these brains will make precisely the same decisions (and each of these 'brains' would think they were conscious and in control of their lives). In my eyes, consciousness is simply a natural phenomenon that can be explained but we just lack the understanding at this moment. Time and time again we have made this mistake of assuming there is something supernatural about the things we cannot comprehend and only a few centuries later it is completely understood scientifically. I think consciousness will be a similar case but will take more time.
  • prynpo 5mo ago
    Nature vs. nurture is also a popular debate. This scenario you described, even with nature being all there is, doesn't imply all our actions and thoughts are shaped by our environment.
  • rishi_devan 5mo ago
    You’re saying it’s all 100% deterministic. But at the quantum level, things are probabilistic. The hundred brains with the same input data might make different decisions like how each ball dropped in the Galton board chooses a different route. But I agree with your overall premise. It can be all understood scientifically. There is nothing supernatural about things we cannot comprehend.
    • ndriscoll 5mo ago
      Quantum theories are consistent with determinism. You just need to give up locality or... free choice.
  • ngruhn 5mo ago
    I think supernatural things don't exist by definition. If ghosts would exist, they would be just natural. The real question is whether there is a two way link between consciousness and the physical world. Obviously the physical world is observed by consciousness, so that direction checks out. What about the other direction? Is the physical world at all influenced by consciousness? The mindfulness folks seem to argue: no. They argue that consciousness is like a person watching a movie, where the movie is experience. The person is so immersed that it thinks, it controls the movie, but in reality it's a fully passive observer. But this can't be true! Otherwise, the discussion of consciousness could never have come up in human history. A population of "philosophical zombies" could never initiate this discussion. So somehow consciousness must cause physical neurons to activate. The movie knows about the person watching!
• pygy_ 5mo ago
  FTA: > Then he declared that there is another distinct problem — why the brain’s behavior is accompanied by experience at all — which he christened the “hard” problem of consciousness. The hard problem isn't about "why", it's about "what it's like". Try to explain what it's like to hear a major and a chord to a deaf person, or what it's like to see magenta to someone who's blind. None of the things you say, sign or write will make them experience these sensations. Ultimately no one but you can know what it's like to be you. This doesn't mean that subjective experience can't be modeled. but the caveats that apply to models in general are relevant here too: none are correct, some are useful. Dualism doesn't necessarily means that subjectivity is ineffable. Mind and matter could work like mathematical duals: platonic solids (cube vs octahedron, dodecahedron vs icosahedron, tetrahedron vs itself), Voronoi diagrams and Delaunay triangulations, etc... These are intimately linked, and you can generate one from the other and inversely, yet they have their own distinct properties.
  • n4r9 5mo ago
    Qualia is the term people often use to mean "what it's like". The hard problem is "why is there qualia". This of course assumes that qualia exists as a coherent thing, which some philosophers dispute.
    • pygy_ 5mo ago
      Indeed, I didn't remember that Chamlers was literally building his argument around the "why?"... But he does. This reduces to the intractable mystery of existence. A more interesting question would be, as usual "how". There are serious attempts at this, coming from both neuroscience and physics (e.g. for the latter https://pubs.aip.org/aip/adv/article/15/11/115319/3372193/Universal-consciousness-as-foundational-field-A https://pubs.aip.org/aip/adv/article/15/11/115319/3372193/Un... )
  • themafia 5mo ago
    > Try to explain what it's like to hear a major and a chord to a deaf person, or what it's like to see magenta to someone who's blind. I know this isn't what you wanted, but the dualism struck me: A major chord is like a blend of two base colors that give rise to a pleasant composite color. Mix the wrong bases and the result is sensibly wrong. Magenta is like when you play a D and an F# together. When you see it at sunset it's like a major D chord surrounded by the sound of babies laughing. When you see it on the battlefield it's like a minor D chord wrestling against the noise of wind and rain.
• jillesvangurp 5mo ago
  Neal Stephenson touches on this topic in several of his novels. Probably the most concrete of this is "Fall; or Dodge in Hell" which involves a simulation of people's scanned brains rediscovering qualia and constructing their own simulated world from scratch. In the book, two of the deceased digital "souls" eventually mate and produce digital offspring and the whole simulation starts consuming more and more resources. His Baroque Cycle series also touches on this in several places. One funny side plot involves a freed African slave (Dappa) who speaks dozens of different languages and is highly intelligent and an aristocratic person who maintains that of course this former slave (who is obviously a lot smarter than this aristocrat) is just a trained monkey that naturally is not conscious even though he is quite clever with language. The same books also have a lot of side plots involving Leibniz and various attempts to build thinking/computing machines. The Dappa plot is probably the closest to a lot of debates there will be around AGI with people likely to insist for all sorts of reasons rooted in philosophy, religion, etc. that even though the AGI walks, talks, etc. like a duck, it can't be a duck. At some point, we'll have AGI that pass any test we can think of and we'll still have people arguing that these cannot be conscious.
  • card_zero 5mo ago
    The clinching thing for me is how the AGI is supposed to work. If it's the same as our theory of how we work, then fine, it's one of us. It wouldn't even have to work very well.
    • vixen99 5mo ago
      I always like to remind myself that AI is trained on material fed to it, created and written (somewhere along the line) entirely by humans - as they perceive & interpret the universe around them.
      • gbgarbeb 5mo ago
        Not for long, if I have my way.
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• modernerd 5mo ago
  There are 325+ theories of consciousness mapped here: https://loc.closertotruth.com/map https://loc.closertotruth.com/map And a good walkthrough here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h5G6Oc_V3Lw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h5G6Oc_V3Lw Many of these already gave up on dualism: they already rejected the idea that mind and body are separate (e.g. panpsychism, the idea that consciousness is a feature of reality, that all matter possesses "experience" of some kind).
• RivieraKid 5mo ago
  Science will never be able to properly even define the concept of consciousness because it's outside the scope of science. Consciousness is something that is used to observe the outer world and science essentially describes patterns in our observations. All scientific laws boil down to subjective perceptions, such as, when I drop an apple, I see that it falls down.
• jheriko 5mo ago
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• geye1234 5mo ago
  > During the Middle Ages, Western civilization described humans as composed of two distinct entities: body and soul. This is absolutely, completely, demonstrably false. Soul-body dualism was largely a 17th-century innovation, although Plato somewhat anticipated it. Most medieval Catholic thought rejected it (and continues to do so), being quite clear that the soul/mind and the body are one entity. How can people in good conscience write about things they're so ignorant of? Gell-Mann suggests I don't read the rest of the article. A brief scan reveals a rehash of the common assertions with no serious attempt to reply to counterarguments.
  • drooby 5mo ago
    "Augustine of Hippo was perhaps the greatest Christian philosopher of Antiquity and certainly the one who exerted the deepest and most lasting influence. He is a saint of the Catholic Church, and his authority in theological matters was universally accepted in the Latin Middle Ages and remained, in the Western Christian tradition, virtually uncontested till the nineteenth century." ..... "...he nevertheless remained convinced that soul is an incorporeal and immortal substance that can, in principle, exist independently of a body" https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/augustine/#AnthGodSoulSoulBody https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/augustine/#AnthGodSoulSou...
  • tim333 5mo ago
    >...[God says] all souls are mine; as the soul of the father, so also the soul of the son is mine: the soul that sinneth, it shall die. from the book of >prophet Ezekiel, exiled in Babylon, during the 22 years from 593 to 571 BC
• throw_m239339 5mo ago
  "You can't seperate the body from the mind", Tool told me.
• psychoslave 5mo ago
  Seems like void of any substance if one takes whatever flavor of monism for granted. Just because everything is supposed to be build on the same fundamental building blocks/fluxes/whatever doesn’t mean every phenomenon is caused by constructions of equal complexities. That is, life referring to something inherently far more complex than inert assemblies remains perfectly valid in many monist perspectives. [edit: took life rather than consciousness as an example, but the stated argument in the article seems to be equally applicable relevant for both concept, or any concept that suppose that emergent complexity is possible]
• tmvphil 5mo ago
  It seems wild to me to write a (popular) article about consciousness in the year 2026 without addressing the elephant in the room: we are able to devise computer programs of increasing complexity that replicate more and more behaviors that were once the sole domain of humans, and at what point do we consider such computers to have experience in the sense that we have, and the sense in which calculators and thermostats do not. It seems that Rovelli is content to say that we should call experience the thing that the brain does, which is all well and good if you're a physicalist (and I am) but it does not help you at all explain which features of the brain are necessary for experience. I think it also helps to sharpen this debate to remember that there is a moral dimension: many have adopted moral systems that widen their sphere of concern and care from the self to the community to the nation to the whole of mankind, usually under the intuitive precept that it is bad to make someone else experience suffering. Should we expand our moral conception of responsibility or care to non-human patients, and if so, which?
  • sdevonoes 5mo ago
    > Should we expand our moral conception of responsibility or care to non-human patients, and if so, which? Such an irony. Humans have has since the bery beginning inflicted pain and suffering on other human beings. We are still doing it directly (e.g., wars) or indirectly (e.g., capitalism). The idea that perhaps in the not so distant future, machines may live better “lives” or be treated better than some humans is pathetic. But here again, there are some pets that live better than a 1000 humans nowadays
    • tmvphil 5mo ago
      I don't know where in my statement you saw the implication that we should not care about bad things happening to other humans, but it was a misapprehension.
• acron0 5mo ago
  > It is time to give up the pernicious dualism introduced by the debate on consciousness and embrace the reality that our soul, or our spiritual life, is consistent with our fundamental physics. Why is it pernicious?
  • PeterWhittaker 5mo ago
    Because it leads us down seemingly useful paths that are in fact dead wrong. There is only physics, but at some levels it more convenient to ignore the physics (what is happening in the body) and to describe our experience. Rovelli is a reductionist, the only logically and physically defensible intellectual position, while dualism is inherently supernatural, invoking phantoms, phenomenology that is purely fictitious.
    • acron0 5mo ago
      Ok, but that doesn't really address "pernicious". I understand pursuits of philosophy are inherently concerned with truth, but does not truth mean pernicious? My experience of reading philosophers is limited; is Rovelli just a materialist and that's that? Is this positivism?
      • PeterWhittaker 5mo ago
        > Is this positivism? My understanding of positivism is, in a nutshell, that its goal is to reduce everything to physics, including social, inter-personal interactions. My read of the article is that Rovelli is focused on the intra-personal, so to that extent it isn't positivism, or is at least a limited, focused positivism. Extending Rovelli's thinking to the inter-personal would be, IMHO, a categorical error: While we may one day be able to fully describe the physics (and electrochemistry, etc.) of everything inside the person, physics is insufficient to describe what happens between people, at least to the extent that what is happening is a result of each person's actions, choices, etc. I think this where bringing qualia in as a level of abstraction is useful: Everything about us is ultimately operating on our physical hardware, but not everything about us is "just physics", since our "us" (our OS, if you will), makes observations and chooses actions that are determined at least to some extent by the "us", and not just by the physical operations. At this point, one could bring in Skinner and make everything operational conditioning, or Kahneman for a slightly different take where much of what we observe or consider consciously (the energy-hungry slow system) has been pre-filtered by physical processes that are not available to us (the energy-efficient fast system). If those lines of thought are correct - and that remains an open question - then we could potentially arrive at a complete positivism wherein everything is determined primarily by our internal physics, though we wouldn't get predictability for the same reason that we cannot solve the three-body-problem analytically or predict the weather accurately for all time or predict with certainty the motions of the planets, etc.: There are too many inter-dependent variables, and modelling will always lag actual behaviour. I think we are on safe ground saying that intra-body behaviour is all physics, and on safe ground describing some of the physics responsible for what we call thought, e.g., neuropsychological processes, but at some point we need to model things differently to continue to make sense, make progress. We get away from just-physics at higher levels of abstraction, with the challenge being to describe the transitions from one model level to another (corporeal electro-chemistry to reflective thought and action to inter-personal relations to sociology and economy). Sort of like how we know that everything is quantum mechanics at the appropriate scale, but that QM isn't terribly useful for modelling weather, planetary motion, etc.
• mooreat 5mo ago
  Unless someone eventually finds the consciousness center in the brain I will continue to hold the position that it is just another property of "things". I know consciousness must be real because it's the first thing I have access to without any sort of reasoning attached on top of it. Its realness is more visceral than atoms or any other physical theory because it is the way in which the world is conveyed to me, but I don't think I'm unique in any way for having it. I feel like all systems, in a panpsychist sense, participate in consciousness, so in some way it's a property of matter or systems in our universe that we have somehow failed to account for in physics. We miss it because systems only exhibit consciousness internally like on top of having all the physical properties of rocks, rocks also have an internal state of being. That internal state of being for the most part is uninteresting cause it doesn't dictate the rocks actual form or function in the universe. I'd argue human consciousness is the same. My conscious experience has nothing to do with the thoughts that are actually being produced. By this I mean there is no authorship of the thoughts and actions I perform by my consciousness. To me it seems more like a stage in which elements of my experience appear for brief moments before fading away, so much like the rock's internal experience my internal experience does not have any affect on the physical world. Part of me then starts to worry why worry about consciousness at all if it's something that doesn't participate in the physical world because then what's the point of it all? Also, if all systems get to participate, then what stops things like basic logic gates on a PC from having consciousness as well. I tend to lean towards thinking that those feelings are similar to the same kinds of feelings humans used to have about thinking they were the center of the universe, but I'm not sure. Sorry for the brain dump, Austin
• paulsutter 5mo ago
  "Consciousness" is a suitcase word. It has so many meanings that any individual speaker can't even keep them straight, much less a group discussion. That's the reason it seems like a thorny topic.
• hoppp 5mo ago
  To me it seems consciousness is a log file that records the results of brain activities originating from different parts of the brain. This log file is loaded into working memory. I have aspergers and that's sort of how I experience my own consciousness, the result of different brain processes, summarised in a log. People are mainly subconscious and not that many things propagate to consciousness and get recorded in the log, because it's a bottleneck. Instead of recording the whole process of emotionally tagging things, people just "feel" something without reasoning. Only the emotional tag or intuition is recorded in the log but not the process to get to it. Non-verbal communication is emitted and processed subconsciously, which is hard for me because of the autism and I arrived to the conclusion that fundamentally human consciousness is a spectrum and how much is recorded into it depends on neurodiversity.
• sebastianconcpt 5mo ago
  This is the Let's deal with the phenomenon of Qualia by denying its existence thesis.
  • azan_ 5mo ago
    Spot on.
    • PeterWhittaker 5mo ago
      Not at all. As the fourth paragraph from the end states, we experience qualia. Rovelli is simply saying that qualia are simply physical processes described from a salient perspective, that is, at a level more abstract than the eletrochemical processes that underlie them. It's a bit like pain: to create better analgesics, we need to work at the lower levels closer to the biology, but a patient describing pain to a doctor works at a higher, descriptive level, as does the doctor. Where is the pain, what are its qualities (dull, sharp, shallow, deep, burning, etc.).
      • sebastianconcpt 5mo ago
        "We have souls. We have an inner self. We can treat ourselves as transcendental subjects in the Kantian sense. We have emotions and spiritual life; we experience qualia. These entities are not obtained by addition to a physical state, but by subtraction from a complete physical account. Mental processes are physical processes described in a way that captures only their salient characteristics." That's the emergence hypothesis. Largely insufficient [1] and the one of every person that doesn't really understand Gödel’s first incompleteness theorem tends to embrace. [1] "We can treat ourselves as transcendental subjects" there is a confusion about expressions of a phenomenon (referent) and real phenomenons (object). It denies Qualia by reducing it to a verbal expression supported by an insufficient model of the universe (current state of Physics).
• kaudinya 5mo ago
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• a13o 5mo ago
  It’s going to be a long road, but I think as LLMs and their offspring create more and more convincing arguments for silicon consciousness we will conclude that consciousness is about as real as humours, and we’ve all been p-zombies this whole time. Maybe the literary creature shoe should have started on the other foot, and sent us in search of proof that we are or are not p-angels. That at least puts the burden of proof on the compatibilists where it belongs.
  • sunir 5mo ago
    Dubious. We will just see logical vs physical space once again and move on with our lives. I think we are already mostly there as a society. I don’t know why this is a block in philosophy let alone computer science. We experience it frequently and have a fundamental theorem about it. Plenty of movies about it as well like the Matrix.
  • rirze 5mo ago
    [dead]
  • tsss 5mo ago
    I don't think people will ever admit that they're not that special. We already know that animals are "conscious" and still treat them with disdain.
  • nothinkjustai 5mo ago
    How can you even argue that we’re p-zombies? I know that I’m not. I assume others aren’t. Maybe you are?
    • a13o 5mo ago
      From a non-dual perspective either nobody is a p-zombie or everybody is a p-zombie. I think the trajectory of LLMs will be that consciousness sensations are abundant and low value, and that will give all the non-dual territory over to the illusionists (who now have a tangible example to point to.) Emergence won't be disproven but it'll be about as interesting as a penny stock. Everyone else is going to go to ground as a dualist and argue for some entirely new unreachable aspect of human exceptionalism, but they'll have ceded qualia as they did for souls. If I had to guess, they'll focus on embodied cognition because building high-fidelity bodies still seems really hard.
• rhubarbtree 5mo ago
  Here's a trippy idea I have about consciousness, which arose from thinking about recent AI advances and also watching kids develop. I think children's main "cost function" is the ability to predict the future. This might start out, for example, as being - how will this vertical line move as I move my head. Later, where is the ball going. And they are essentially building a "world model" in their brains, starting with the very simple like this and recursively building more complex predictors. When they predict correctly, happy feedback reinforces the connections that are firing, when they are wrong, they weaken. Just a really simple feedback algorithm that is super robust. So the brain is building this world model, and it's essentially gradually compressing a description of the environment into a structure made of neurons. And this is the ultimate survival tactic: model the environment explicitly in your head, then adapt your behaviour to fit it. The better you are adapating to future states (dodging that tree as you run) the better survival chance you have. At some point (complete speculation) we then begin to do something quite strange: we develop a world model _of ourselves_. We get to a level of sophistication where we begin to predict the future states of our own brains. This might emerge naturally as a way to compress existing learnt behaviour. For example, we re-learn to follow lines in a smarter way, particularly as other parts of the brain learn useful things that we can re-use in our line following. This treats our existing model as a cost function, and we learn a model of the model. But it eventually starts to model the higher-level models the brain has, higher up the abstraction stack. And somehow, the modelling of our brain function creates a chaotic feedback loop that leads to the sensation of consciousness. It's super handwavey, I know, but somehow this recursion feeds awareness. It's like the abilty to see yourself thinking. Consider meditating and the way words appear in consciousness... you get to a point where you can observe what you're going to say before you say them, and I conjecture that is the modelling of the model that's going on. And this is useful for survival, as you can optimise the way you think, compressing your circuits further, but also has this weird side-effect of creating awareness. It also explains why consciousness takes time to develop - because you need to develop a model of yourself, but before that you need a model of the world.
  • deleted 5mo ago
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  • svnt 5mo ago
• 329a8Hqag 5mo ago
  The magazine is funded by: https://berggruen.org/projects https://berggruen.org/projects The investment arm for this influencer fund is: https://www.berggruenholdings.com/ https://www.berggruenholdings.com/ The fund is invested in AI and Berggruen pushes the AI/UBI narrative: https://www.ft.com/content/9b93e02a-c693-4070-9094-a2f532dfa929 https://www.ft.com/content/9b93e02a-c693-4070-9094-a2f532dfa... https://www.linkedin.com/in/nicolasberggruen?trk=public_post_feed-actor-name https://www.linkedin.com/in/nicolasberggruen?trk=public_post... You can already see from the glossy website that this is a well funded propaganda magazine, just like Quantaagazine is essentially funded by the Renaissance Fund, which is invested in AI. Yes, these magazines do have interesting articles from time to time, but the overt materialistic (not monetary, but anti-idealistic) worldview that traditionally only appeared in communist countries suddenly infests all the rich people's outlets.
  • kogasa240p 5mo ago
    Very good post
  • housecarpenter 5mo ago
    Why would it serve the interests of AI companies to promote materialism? It seems to me that idealism would be more in the interest of AI companies to promote, since my impression is idealists are more likely than materialists to believe that AI will never be conscious, and AI being perceived as conscious would be problematic for companies that want to provide AI as a product.
• blamestross 5mo ago
  https://arxiv.org/pdf/1308.4375 https://arxiv.org/pdf/1308.4375 I felt like this paper nailed it years a go, and nobody has followed up properly. The metric involved is basically impossible to compute fully, but easy to approximate. Any online approximation will model everything it can see have changes until it is satisfied.
• losvedir 5mo ago
  I once read a comment on here that I found interesting but haven't been able to find it again. Basically it flipped the problem on its head. We're arguing how you start at the physical substrate and get to consciousness. They argued that you could start with consciousness and argue how you get to the physical side (experimentation via your conscious experience, etc). It was from a religious individual who called the conscious experience God and went further into how we all share this sliver of godhood. Does anyone who knows philosophical "camps" know the terms for what I'm trying to remember? I guess I've leaned "materialist" for most of my life, but what other common philosophies (as in the academic discipline) are there?
  • Joker_vD 5mo ago
    This side is traditionally called "idealist", and it usually very quickly collapses into solipsism of different varieties. There is not much you can show against the "there is a single existing soul that has many different persons (as opposed to each person having a different, personal soul) that dreams about the 'physical' reality" hypothesis except "I don't think my imagination is that good", really.
    • visarga 5mo ago
      What I reject most about idealism is that it is free. Life is hard and expensive, but soul is free. How come? Is our soul understood like a spherical cow?
      • rirze 5mo ago
        "Yes."
      • Joker_vD 5mo ago
        > How come? Well, you gotta spend the eternity somehow, so maybe the soul just got bored and started inventing miserable experiences for itself. Yes, it's ridiculous.
  • mjburgess 5mo ago
    Yes, it's called idealism. And the whole field of it is a pile of fallacies of ambiguity that can take years to see and treat with caution.
• qarl 5mo ago
  Personally I think the quantum immortality/suicide argument points directly at the trouble with the "duality". It's a perfectly physical/mechanical argument that demonstrates that consciousness is much much more bizarre than we expect.
  • essentia0 5mo ago
    What is the argument?
• deleted 5mo ago
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• zjbt 5mo ago
  I think these philosophical arguments boil down to answering the question "what is real?". Contemporary science is presented as an objective theory of reality, but our experiences form the actual starting point for everything that we can ever know about reality, so they ought to be considered real in some sense. The tension begins because, while a physical theory of reality will say that the signals in a brain are real signals, that does not imply the reality of any concepts that those signals may represent. If I imagine something, that does not make it real. But then the same can be argued for all experiences: there are real brain signals associated with them, but that does not imply the reality of those experiences. This lead to a gap in that the physical theory fails to imply, and thus fails to explain, the reality of experience. So, if I believe in the reality of my own experience, then I am left to ask "why is my experience real?", as that is not required or implied by the physical theory of reality. It sounds like Rovelli's resolution is to acknowledge the centrality of subjective experiences to the formulation of scientific theories, and thus also to any theory of reality. Experiences are the starting point, with the rest being built up from them. Therefore, experiences should also be the first thing added into the bucket of things that one believes to be real. Meanwhile, any physical model of objective reality has a far more tenuous spot in that bucket. We may suspect it to be real through various deductions, but the further away we get from experiences, the more assumptions have to be made to get there. Anyway, I agree that there is no explanatory gap when reality is viewed in this manner. And this is a relatively palatable way to approach the question of reality (compared to, e.g., the mathematical universe hypothesis, which most find unacceptable). But as long as there is debate about what makes up reality and where experiences fit into that, the debate around the hard consciousness problem will continue, and I regard this problem to be of a different character (being far more philosophical) than, say, spiritualism or anti-Darwinism.
• axus 5mo ago
  Is it time to give up on the value of (other) human beings? Time will tell.
• storus 5mo ago
  This article had absolutely no proof of its statements and all it did was use past allegories. We are definitely missing something in our understanding of the world, like before we knew about electromagnetism or radioactivity. There are some mechanisms we know about that contribute to the knowledge of self that become exposed by conditions like Depersonalization/Derealization disorder from certain neurons in inflammatory environment, making one feel detached from their own body, feeling like they control a videogame character instead. Yet that still doesn't tell where does the "self" come from.
  • trollbridge 5mo ago
    Agreed. The main reason we believe consciousness exists is because we all experience it. So it’s hard to deny.
    • olalonde 5mo ago
      As a philosophical zombie, I have to disagree here.
    • tim333 5mo ago
      But the debate isn't whether consciousness exists. It's largely whether it's the product of normal neurons doing their thing or something more. Also the details of how it works of course.
      • jffhn 5mo ago
        It cannot be just a product of the body, else it could not have effect on the body and our tongues could not be moving speaking about it.
        • cameldrv 5mo ago
          Chalmers’ claim is that the fact that it really exists and the fact that we can talk about it are unrelated and basically a coincidence, which I think is completely absurd… If you really believe in qualia IMO you have to bite the bullet and say that there must be physics that we don’t yet understand.
• dboreham 5mo ago
  For anyone interested in this subject, I found this paper to be quite helpful: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.14545 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.14545
• svnt 5mo ago
  This argument sounds nice at a surface level, but seems deeply incoherent and wrong in a way I haven’t yet put my finger on precisely. How can you say this: > We have souls. We have an inner self. We can treat ourselves as transcendental subjects in the Kantian sense. We have emotions and spiritual life; we experience qualia. These entities are not obtained by addition to a physical state, but by subtraction from a complete physical account. Mental processes are physical processes described in a way that captures only their salient characteristics. followed by this: > The reason why this picture is more credible than any dualism is not that “science explains everything” — it doesn’t — or because “physics explains everything” — it does so even less. It is because of the hundreds of years of astonishing and unexpected success of the sciences that have convincingly shown that apparent metaphysical gaps are never such. followed by this: > Earth is not metaphysically different from the heavens, living beings are not metaphysically different from inanimate matter, humans are not metaphysically different from other animals. The soul is not metaphysically different from the body. We are all parts of nature, like anything else in this sweet world. So it isn’t describable by physics but it is only physics? And there are no closures or gaps? Ok sure in one sense we can say everything is connected, but this article seems to me to demonstrate effectively that without these divisions, pursuing understanding of it is essentially intractable. He seems to be describing the dissolution of some construct in his worldview that I am having a difficult time relating to. Anyone have a different take?
  • visarga 5mo ago
    I think there is a gap, but it's not what they think it is - it is the gap between description and execution. Chalmers wants a description level explanation for the properties of execution, which is not possible. He wants to get for free what is an irreducible recursion between cost and action. The gap is not ontological, it is epistemic. It just means we can't know without paying the price, walking the path of the process, step by step. No jumping ahead. We can't even predict a 3 body system far ahead. We can't tell the properties of a code without executing it. We can't compress most processes, their execution is the shortest description. Chalmers wants 3p to eat for free at the table of 1p.
    • 5mo ago
• jmpfrog 5mo ago
  [flagged]
• whack 5mo ago
  There is a problem with the thesis that consciousness is a purely physical phenomenon. It implies that someone writing the "wrong" sequence of 0s and 1s, by hand, on a completely private journal, has committed a moral crime on par with slavery and genocide. Full proof: https://outlookzen.com/2017/04/03/philosophical-proof-for-the-human-soul/ https://outlookzen.com/2017/04/03/philosophical-proof-for-th...
  • tim333 5mo ago
    Only for a rather weird definition of moral crime.
• sethev 5mo ago
  The Hard Problem strikes me as a "why" question and humans have a poor track record of ever answering a "why" for a foundational question (at least in a way that we can demonstrate to others). Our most successful explanations build up from simpler things to explain more complex things. But at some point, the explanation bottoms out on things we can't further explain - like the fields in quantum theory. There's currently no further thing below those that explain "why a field theory?" If we solved the Easy Problems of consciousness, i think we would find ourselves in a similar position where most people would simply accept that we had an explanation and move on but some people with a more philosophical bent would continue to search for underlying explanations.
• morpheos137 5mo ago
  Mention "consciousness" get a slew of incoherent responses. There is no "hard problem." the burden of proof has always been on those who claim there is. whats it like is what it is what it is is what it is like. the question has the innanity of a circle asking "why do I have an interior?"
• farthest 5mo ago
  tl;dr "I disagree."
• throwpoaster 5mo ago
  “Post hoc, ergo propter hoc.”
• arcwhite 5mo ago
  Mu.
  • lioeters 5mo ago
    Slow-clap with one hand.
• lo_zamoyski 5mo ago
  Some good reminders in this article. However, while I, too, reject Cartesian dualism, some of the claims of the author need correction... "Many felt confounded or degraded by the idea of sharing a family tree with donkeys. [...] Amid the current cultural backlash against progressive ideas, today’s debate on consciousness reflects our human fears of belonging to the same family as inanimate matter and losing our dear, transcendent souls. [...] The current debate on consciousness is influenced by our entrenched traditional ideas of ourselves" Whose fear? Don't generalize, Carlo. These may be fears rooted in the modernist and Cartesian legacy, but they are only "traditional" if you think the world came into being during the 17th-18th century. Look back further and you find an Aristotelian and Thomistic view that also rejects metaphysical dualism. The soul here is the form of the body, which is to say, its formal cause. It isn't some ghost haunting a corpse or a puddle of ectoplasm. It is a principle. In this view, everything that is alive has a soul, which, again, is the name we give to the form of a living thing. Soul is just a class of form, and everything that exists has form. What makes human beings different from other animals is, at the very least, that we possess intellects (and so, ontologically speaking, any embodied being with an intellect is human). The human intellect, according to this view, cannot be purely material, even if it relies on matter and even though it is united with bodily operations. The reason for this is that abstraction cannot occur in matter alone, as abstraction involves a mental operation of conceptual separation of the form of a thing as given in the senses. Matter (specifically what's called prime matter) is merely the principle of instantiation, and so it cannot "host" forms without instantiating that form. In other words, form + matter = thing. "During the Middle Ages, Western civilization described humans as composed of two distinct entities: body and soul." No that is not how people viewed the body and the soul in the Middle Ages (or in, say, Catholicism). That is a very Cartesian view of human beings, that we are two things, not one. "The body was an interconnected bunch of matter that decayed and died. The soul belonged to a transcendent spiritual world independent from vile matter." Matter wasn't vile, unless you were some kind of Gnostic or Cathar heretic or whatever. The physical was seen as good, as created by God, and human beings were understood as spiritual-corporeal unities that are by one nature both spiritual and physical. (The "spiritual" here has to do with the intellectual and free nature of man; again, not ectoplasm or ghosts). Indeed, if anything, Christianity elevated the dignity of the physical. Why bother with a resurrection after death if matter sucks? Why would the body and blood of Christ be so precious to Catholics if matter is evil? It is Gnostic dualism and similar movements that construed the physical as evil, but these were heretical movements, not views characteristic of the Middle Ages. -- All that being said, I think the author would benefit greatly from a rigorous study of Aristotelian metaphysics, both to avoid these sorts of caricatures (as well as any misconceptions of science), but also to deepen his understanding. I think his rejection of dualism is on the right track, but he is missing out on a rich and robust intellectual tradition that has been sidelined by exactly those sorts of modernists that perpetuated this whole intellectual muddle in the first place.
• Mikhail_K 5mo ago
  > "But scientific understanding is not extraneous to experience; it is entirely > about experience." Let us hear about your experience of a wavefunction, Carlo.
• pasta67 5mo ago
  But there is dualism in our minds - we have two spheres of brains and one of those is in master position over other and synchronize both parts. As a result the enslaved part of our brains is silent watcher. But sometimes brains get damaged and these mechanisms malfunction.
• maclombardi 5mo ago
  Something worth reading alongside this. https://www.immaculateconstellation.info/already-burning/ https://www.immaculateconstellation.info/already-burning/
• catigula 5mo ago
  Making confident, sweeping claims about consciousness is proof that someone hasn't thought about it very deeply or just doesn't know very much.
• leephillips 5mo ago
  Why the complete rewriting of the title?
  • tim333 5mo ago
    That's always been a puzzle to me with HN. A lot of articles have perfectly good titles and for some reason they get modified to something less accurate.
• nakedneuron 5mo ago
  Boom.. there we go again.. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40554217 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40554217 > Philosophy seems to be concerned with furniture a lot) > If we do not fall into the error of dualism upfront, we can safely speak of > soul and emotions just as we speak of a kitchen table, even if the table is > also a collection of atoms.
• throw7 5mo ago
  Just stating that consciousness is natural phenomenon is begging the question. We get it... you're a materialist.
  • deleted 5mo ago
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  • namero999 5mo ago
    Naturalism and materialism are not married together. Materialism can't claim naturalism just for itself. There are coherent ontologies that are naturalists and not materialists.
• summarybot 5mo ago
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• jallasprit 5mo ago
  This entire thread is just «I am a strange loop» by Douglas Hofstadter
• deleted 5mo ago
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• kajaktum 5mo ago
  Reading Ashtavakra Gita gives me more insight into this than any other literature that I have read. The ultimate reality is that: There's nothing else other than this. This is all there is. To anyone discussing whether or not consciousness exist, tell me do you have proof that other people have consciousness? There's simply no credible answer to this question other than "well they have to be...cause we share the same material". But that is a experiment with a sample of 1. The weird thing is, if you are able to proof someone else's consciousness, that is just an extension of your own consciousness. Next question, how do you prove that you are not sleeping right now? What proof do you have that you are not living inside an illusion? You have surely experienced the illusion of understanding i.e. you realized that you "understanding" or the feeling of "understanding" was wrong. What is to say that this is not happening now? In reality, there is nothing to discover. There is just this and that is all there is.
• SKILNER 5mo ago
  It is time to give up arguments without evidence.
• snowwrestler 5mo ago
  I think what is needed, and what will happen, is to pull apart concepts like intelligence, consciousness, and language use, and create narrower and more rigorous definitions of what those are. My go-to analogy is the concept of heat and warmth, which was the subject of philosophical speculation and inquiry for centuries. But ultimately it was not useful or predictive until it was redefined very narrowly by scientists as a specific measurable attribute of a collection of molecules. Arguably this redefinition itself was an important component of the establishment of “science” as a discipline distinct from philosophy. This let scientists work with heat rigorously, even though non-scientists still have a largely colloquial vocabulary about it, e.g. “this coat is warmer than my last one.” On matters like consciousness, we’re all still smashed together into colloquial land, arguing about definitions when we think we are arguing about concepts. I do think the current advancements in AI may help us develop the new vocabulary we need to quantitatively reason about intelligence and language, and in doing so, help better define / constrain what the we mean by consciousness. We think of LLMs now as a tool we can use to do work, but another view is that they are a sensor that directly correlates physical inputs to intelligent outputs. Sort of like how burning can be used to measure the energy contained in various materials, in addition to keeping us warm.
• bartjekwartje 5mo ago
  My take is that we are all living an illusion which is the continuous perception of a ‘self’. All people are inside the bubble of the self as it is part and parcel of the human condition and baked into the neural pathways that are created while still in the womb. It is like an operating system that is locked down to running only one application ‘self’. It is only when there is glitch in the system that the self relinquishes its stranglehold over our consciousness and it becomes just another background process alongside other mental processes. The ghost in the system disappears.
• sleepyams 5mo ago
  I think that whether we think of consciousness in terms of dualism, or if we think of it as emergent from natural behavior, it really doesn't matter functionally. Either way we are positioning it as something inaccessible from our realm or control. I believe that we can at least posit some kind of mechanism through which emergence can happen. In my opinion we should look at language and how language evolved. However, i also believe we should expand our study of natural language to things like network protocols, and observe the "protocol hourglass" structure that has emerged from the internet protocol stack. In my mind, the concepts of control and autonomy are what need to be revisited. We conflate the two: we are autonomous IF we are able to exert control on the environment. However, I think the reality might be that autonomous systems are more similar to an API in the sense that we can interact along the boundary but through the API we cannot exert control over the internal structure of the system (through knowledge or physical control).
• everdrive 5mo ago
  I've actually been waiting for this. All you need to do is ask the rhetorical "But if there's something that it's like to _be_ [thing / animal / whatever]" Once you ask that, you never need to explain anything. This is a magical process that can never be touched by observation or explanation.
  • pardon_me 5mo ago
    I've been wondering if imagination is the closest thing to free will we have.
• nakedneuron 5mo ago
  As soon as we'll have sufficiently advanced BMIs the so called hard problem will go away by itself. Consider probing a midlevel mobile phone at some hundred contacts. You might be convinced to have a thorough account of the physical reality yet still no idea of (and no way to know) whats going on. To the problem of qualia.. I think it's the mechanism of the brain to default-name recurring patterns, being part of a simplification/compression process, without which reasoning (computing) or reasonably storing experiences would be impossible. I guess visual qualia like color and shape have to be the first things the brain learns and attaches "default" symbols to. Consider other basic qualia too, like to be saturated, to feel warm and then higher qualia that build on these like to feel loved or accepted in a social community. It's difficult to argue how there could be a fundamental truth to qualia. But consider that there'd be no difference in our communication, even if your red is attached to a symbol signified by 8NCYUW6D0H5C (lets just assume this) while my red is encoded as being GAUTP1P6YUUZ (those patterns obviously have to be encoded as frequency patterns as we perceive close colors as similar without computational overhead). Eventually it will turn out, qualia from person to person are encoded quite similar, as we are genetically so similar. But consider also synaesthetia. Wrt animals, it WOULD feel strange to be a bat or any other animal as some of their sensory apparatus is so different. To this, author makes a good point: "Today, we do not have an exhaustive external account, but this is not the same as having proof that no such account is possible." I imagine consciousness as 'theater mode' of the perceiving mind. As such it seems to be one part of the brain that integrates all sensory inputs into one Multimodal Experience Stream™. As to TFA.. - I'm by no means up to date to the current affairs of the consciousness debate, but - is there really a "fierce debate [...] raging"? Check out Joscha Bach who argues consciousness is an illusion. Looking for some material to back up, I hit on this text. Flying over it I already find it more enlightening than the posted article, so I post it here (without guarantee): https://medium.com/@mbonsign/consciousness-as-illusion-exploring-the-symmetries-between-high-dimensional-representation-658d59b123aa https://medium.com/@mbonsign/consciousness-as-illusion-explo... Some (citated) citations from it: "The simulation becomes “more real than real” in our experience because it constitutes the entirety of our conscious access to ourselves and the world (Metzinger, 2003; Seth, 2021)." "This perspective doesn’t diminish the richness or importance of conscious experience. On the contrary, it highlights the remarkable complexity and sophistication of the processes that generate our subjective experience. The constructed nature of consciousness isn’t a defect or limitation but a remarkable achievement — a way of making an unimaginably complex reality manageable for finite cognitive systems (Clark, 2016; Dennett, 2017)." Please also note https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48180487 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48180487 and consider joining my cult.
• jamesalvarez 5mo ago
  Articles like these just make me think that's its a real possibility that not everyone has consciousness. Like some people are no conscious of their own visual imagery, maybe some people are not conscious at all.
  • wat10000 5mo ago
    I came here to comment this same thing. I had this idea as a laugh, but I'm taking it more and more seriously as time goes on. There are very confident statements made here that I don't think a conscious human could sincerely claim. If the author isn't taking the piss (and no indication they are) then I strongly suspect they don't have consciousness. Kind of ironic given the bit of the article that focuses on P-Zombies and how they don't work because they have to be indistinguishable. Well, what if P-Zombies are real, and they are distinguishable, it's just not obvious because the P-Zombies grew up in a world where people talk about consciousness and lots of people around them have it.
• sigbottle 5mo ago
  I've been working through the American pragmatist tradition - James, Pierce, Sellars, Rorty, Brandom. Something about that background, all the discussions about definitions and representation, the original article talking about dualisms.... It's certainly an experience.
• KingFelix 5mo ago
  I'll add a comment that hopefully won't get buried. The hard problem that Rovelli is talking was, I think, the first time someone said something in the field of consciousness that people could (at the time) agree on. Not many people were openly discussing in the 90's in academic settings. It was proposed by Chalmers as a young undergrad at the Science of Consciousness conference. I have been attending for awhile and really enjoy it. There are so many opinions and thoughts on this post, if you are really into thinking about consciousness, this year the conference will be in San Diego. It's a long day of lectures, followed by evenings of great conversations. https://cs2026.org/ https://cs2026.org/
• metalman 5mo ago
  anyone who is atempting to define consiousness, probably isn't. and in there blind greed are trying to turn that definition into marketable property.
• rbanffy 5mo ago
  It seems that, until we have a falsifiable test for consciousness, these exercises are pointless. All we have is the ability to externally observe behavior and we can't judge what happens inside someone (or something's) mind. BTW, we don't have a good definition of mind either. That there's nothing magical or supernatural in our minds and our consciousness is a given, otherwise, this becomes a very silly debate where everyone will have a strong position that can be neither proven nor disproven. Maybe we are able to constrain what consciousness (or a mind, or a soul) is by figuring out everything it isn't. Does it have a mass? Can we measure its entropy? We can, to a certain degree, identify images from the visual cortex. What else about the internal state of a brain can we extract? We did that to a fly's brain the other day - a very confused simulated fly that must have been wondering why its world had so low a resolution.
• otakucode 5mo ago
  I mean, I would argue that they are right, but there is still a hard problem of consciousness. What properties must a system hold in order to exhibit consciousness? Personally, I think I could fairly capably argue that consciousness is an emergent property of any feedback loop composed of a large enough collection of highly interconnected adaptive components embedded within a sufficiently pattern-rich environment. Every feedback loop which meets these requirements is conscious, and removing any single one of those elements causes consciousness to disappear. I believe the property emerges in a similar manner to how 'heat' emerges from electromagnetic interactions of atoms. This definition has implications, and all that I have thought of are real. Total sensory deprivation results in loss of consciousness, for example.
• mistidoi 5mo ago
  I found this article really frustrating. The author takes a blurry position between non-dualist naturalists like John Searle and eliminativists like Dennett and the Churchlands and doesn't seem to engage with them at all, much less probing into the issues with those views that might motivate people like Chalmers and Nagel. It crescendos with a hand-wave: > The mind is the behavior of the brain, properly described in a high-level language. Neither my own experience of myself nor an external experience of me is primary[.] A number of views about consciousness are compatible with statements like that (like the ones above and many others), each with their own philosophical tradeoffs and bullets to bite. The author seems generally unaware of them yet somehow confident that they've solved the matter.
  • deleted 5mo ago
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  • dreamlayers 5mo ago
    I find this subject frustrating. People actually know very little about it, yet they end up telling and debating complex stories about it.
    • rolph 5mo ago
      [dead]
    • tim333 5mo ago
      Yeah. There's something to be said for sticking to the little known as far as possible.
  • sbdaman 5mo ago
    It's because he's not a philosopher and is wading into a long-standing philosophical debate and hand-waving away all the actual issues in contention.
• bigbuppo 5mo ago
  So if I read that right, there's no difference between myself and my desk, ergo my desk is conscious and that Buddhists are probably right.
• dannyfritz07 5mo ago
  You can affect your consciousness by hitting yourself in the head with a hammer. Pretty good argument for me to believe it is a physical phenomenon.
  • kevlxd 5mo ago
    Let's say you have a dream where you hit yourself in the head with a hammer and pass out. Surely that won't lead you to believe that your consciousness arises from your dream brain.
• dreamlayers 5mo ago
  To me, the hard problem of consciousness is the link between observable physical activity of matter in the brain, and conscious experience. Science has found correlations between brain activity and experiences. But nothing is known about a mechanism of cause and effect which connects them. Dualism is probably mistaken. The only evidence we have for anything about physical reality comes from experiences. It does not seem logical to believe that there is a physical reality which is separate from conscious experience. Quantum theory hints at this, with how the observer becomes significant. But this does not make understanding how it all works much easier.
• Zufriedenheit 5mo ago
  I am consciousness.
• Balgair 5mo ago
  I was watching someone doing a really deep dive into speculative biology [0], and they finally got to the sentience/sapience/intelligence/sophont episode [1]. I'm not an expert in this area, but there was a discussion about obligative sapience and facultative sapience that i found fascinating. Obligative sapience is only know to have evolved in humans. Obligative means we cannot survive without sapience. We must learn and use tools and whatever to live and continue evolution. While facultative sapience seems to be a broadly used survival strategy across the animal kingdom - from crows to spiders to cuttlefish. Facultative sapients are able to survive without their learned behaviors, using them instead to augment their evolution. Viewing these issues from the point of evolution and actually having a comparison, I feel, helps ground the discussion better. Even more so from the very strange point of view of speculative biology. The creator of the 'Neotectons' gives a very strange viewpoint on the debate too, with good reasoning though not bulletproof by any means. As with any model, you can make it tapdance if you mess with the parameters enough. But I think that more efforts into speculative arenas would be helpful. Gedankenexperiments for sophonts and not just elevators and cosmology. [0] https://www.youtube.com/@Biblaridion https://www.youtube.com/@Biblaridion [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9dGZju583QA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9dGZju583QA
• juanre 5mo ago
  So the hard problem of consciousness is no more once you accept that we have souls. Which is essentially giving the problem a new name and burdening it with more historical baggage. Michael Pollan's "A World Appears" is a much more interesting and nuanced take. Very much recommended.
• yourbestcrab 5mo ago
  I enjoyed the article, and I'm actually, surprisingly, fairly convinced by his idea there is something off about things like the imaginary philosophical zombie[1]. I think that the idea of a soul or spirit could be both interesting and also self evident though, so it's odd to read these being thrown out in the same bath water. I.e if we imagine our simplified brains as points of matter with signals being sent between; then the kind of experience we have as human beings is more about the relationships between the matter. I don't see that as a harmful duality as if it were the case, it would shed light on what we understand and how. We're still physical but exist in "spirit of matter", different but bound. No magic required. I'd see this as fairly separate from the question of why we witness ourselves, which seems more prone to mental trickery. Rovelli also has some fun popsci book on how Time might be constructed. Mostly a fun read but the theories, when he gets to them, are an interesting take. Highly recommend. [1] However if Carlo Rovelli were a philosophical zombie, are these exactly the responses he would give - as it wouldn't "see" the moment of awareness and be confused by implied significance? I think so.
• deleted 5mo ago
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• iamalizard 5mo ago
  If qualia is just an emergent property, it should follow that ethics exists just as a means to achieve a practical end like order or societal stability. What would be the answer to "in an isolated universe, would torturing a being capable of experiencing qualia be good, bad or neither?". I can't accept it would be neither. Pain is negative and that's obvious to me even though I'm a masochist. Suffering is negative if you want to get more precise. I don't know what qualia is, but it IS something. Some people don't seem to get any arguments and debates about it, at all. Others do. I doubt the people that don't get it are zombies but it's weird that someone can't even comprehend what the issue is about. When I say "red" or "pain", they talk about neurons and whatnot. Of course that's true, but don't they feel the redness and the pain subjectively in a way that makes them question how that feeling relates to the atoms, neurons and other levels of abstraction could be used to describe the physical reality? And I think, having read a bunch of philosophy years ago that solved nothing, dualism or not is not the right question right now, in our level of understanding. It's not even the right answer because what's "physical" is not well defined either. If we can explain qualia, why would that explanation not count as a "physical" one? If there's some logic to it, it's as physical as anything else. Lots of ill-defined questions and assumptions. I think we should accept qualia is not understood and won't be for some time. We should realize we can suffer and so can beings similar to us. Where do we draw the line - we'll have to base that on what we know about biology. To me it's obvious many animals are capable of suffering. I think that's a good place to start with our ethics. Suffering is shit, let's reduce it as much as possible.
• Kim_Bruning 5mo ago
  “The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim.” The answer to whether a submarine can swim tells you more about the person the about the submarine. Meanwhile submarines propel themselves under the waves just fine[1] , and stalk their prey with silent impunity. Perhaps we should call these discussions "swimming submarine debates"? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfa-class_submarine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfa-class_submarine could hit 41 kts(47 mph; 76 km/h) ... which is pretty good for something that couldn't swim ;)
• api 5mo ago
  I think part of the answer is that AI shows that intelligence and consciousness are unrelated phenomena. Humans happen to be both. I think this has been obvious from the other side of the argument forever. Animals obviously have consciousness and emotional responses and they are made of the same living matter we are, but my pet bunnies can’t do natural language or math.
• nothinkjustai 5mo ago
  > From a non-dual perspective either nobody is a p-zombie or everybody is a p-zombie. Why? It’s perfectly sane to just treat claims as is. You claim you’re a p-zombie, than you are. Claim you are conscious, than you are same as me. Claim you aren’t and you get no moral affordances, let’s see how long you last with that tactic. Clankers are not conscious, good luck convincing me otherwise idiot.
• fs_tab 5mo ago
  I think that having a point of view (having an "inside") has a great deal to do with survival. You probably don't need a brain to have a subject. You probably just need dynamics with the right causal structure. When you look at a cell, you can clearly see how the dynamics are existential and already do the work of classifying inputs as "good" or "bad" (eg: paramecium encounters acid, this triggers an electro chemical cascade in the membrane cortex which results in the organism quickly changing direction away from the bad gradient). There's no mind obviously in the human sense, but the fact remains that this system has developed into something that can discriminate between good and bad for itself, because without this integration, it wouldn't exist. The cell is as close to a machine as possible. But it's not a machine because people make machines to have specific purposes. Each part is already labeled and designed. You can shut down a machine that's running, and start it back up with very predictable behavior (since you designed it). The cell is a process that uses physical matter to keep its own possible futures available. Machines also support processes and goals, but these are externally imposed. The cell's ultimate goal is to continue being the reason for its own existence. Maybe this is where all goals come from. So I guess experience is what happens when you have enough layers above this machinery that you you are no longer connected directly to the world, "you" can only meet the world through internally generated/classified electrochemical states from the body. These states have valence because the system is already organized around maintaining these states within metabolic limits. Think...hunger. You don't feel hungry. You ARE hungry. Hunger is a part of how "you" are constituted.
• rachidsahde 5mo ago
  [flagged]
• felixmeziere 5mo ago
  I followed and was very interested until: > But the argument is weak. A philosophical zombie would claim to know what subjective experience is; otherwise, it would be empirically distinguishable from a human. Chalmers’s point is that the existence of the hypothetical, irreducible consciousness of which he speaks is something we can be convinced of only by introspection. During introspection, physical processes in my brain convince me of my consciousness. The same would theoretically happen in the zombie brain, convincing it of having consciousness as well. If this is true, can I believe my own conclusion of having this mysterious non-physical experience, knowing that if I were a zombie, I would be convinced of the same without actually having it? The argument is self-defeating. My reaction here: it seems to me that the p-zombie by construction doesn't have a "me" to be convinced, so "physical processes in my brain convince me of my consciousness. The same would theoretically happen in the zombie brain, convincing it of having consciousness as well." doesn't make sense. Therefore the demonstration that the argument is self-defeating fell appart, and I stopped finding the article insightful. Can someone help me see what I'm missing?
• tim333 5mo ago
  I'm not sure the article really adds up. The hard problem of consciousness in a normal definition is: >to explain how and why organisms have qualia or subjective experience. (from Wikipedia) (or "why the brain’s behavior is accompanied by experience at all" in the article) He then supposes this "assumes upfront that there exists a metaphysical gap between mind and body". But there probably isn't so he jumps to: >So, there is no “hard problem of consciousness.” But that doesn't explain how/why there are qualia and the like. I personally think how/why qualia it a real hard question but scientifically tractable. A little guessing. You can assume we evolved - much evidence - and so consciousness has survival / reproductive functionality. The brain has billions of sensory, memory and other neurons and they have to compress that data down to something a creature can act on - should it feed of run away etc. So conscious awareness is probably something like a situation summary you can act on. One interesting thing is there is a lot of unconscious awareness and actions going on - when you walk across a room the nervous system has to process all sorts of stuff about your body position and coordinate dozens of muscles but you are normally not consciously aware of it, so presumably the conscious bit of you brain is some small portion linked to the thinking talking and remembering bits. I think much of the subtlety of conscious experience is because there is a lot of unconscious things underlying it. You see say a red apple and it's linked to memories of apples, instincts for food, evolved associations with red, your mood and the like. It all gets reduced in something like a lossy compression to what you are aware of.
  • perfmode 5mo ago
    [flagged]
• chimpanzee2 5mo ago
  > scientific understanding is not extraneous to experience; it is entirely about experience Not true: Science is precisely about finding truths that hold even if our conscious experience of them vanished the very next moment. > Empiricism, the grounding of knowledge in experience Another false equivalency: by "experience" here he means "observation", not consciousness. Observations are data points, consciousness is not.
• silent_cal 5mo ago
  The author demonstrates a common misunderstanding about medieval philosophy. The medieval Scholastic tradition does not maintain that the body and the soul were "distinct entities", or that matter was "vile". In fact that kind of thinking was the position of gnostic groups that Christian thinkers were resolutely opposed to. Read St Augustine's "Confessions" if you don't believe me. Scholastic philosophers taught that body and soul were two components of the SAME entity, the human being, and that both were good because they were created by God. One good essence with two components, in other words. And while they claimed that the soul component was immaterial, that absolutely did NOT mean that the soul was not part of the natural world. To claim this is to seriously misunderstand their view of the physical world. To them, matter was only one component of creation. The strict mind/body dualism was not introduced by medieval Scholastics, but rather by the advent of modernity in Descartes, and developed further by Kant and other enlightenment philosophers. In other words, this is very far from being a medieval problem - on the contrary, it a problem created by modern philosophy. As for the author's equation between subjective experience and qualities of things, or his equation of processes in the brain with the mind itself, this just ignores the facts. Qualities we observe in nature are obviously distinct from the feelings they produce in us in many cases (beauty, sublimity, injustice, etc. produce distinct feelings like reverence, humility, anger), and if the mind were equivalent to brain processes, then certain powers of the mind that we obviously have would be impossible (such as our ability to reflect on those very same brain processes in ourselves).
  • sbdaman 5mo ago
    Physicist writing on the hard problem of consciousness. It's like a caricature of annoying physicists.
    • silent_cal 5mo ago
      Yes, the same type of confusion we are used to hearing from pop physicists like Lawrence Krauss, Neil Tyson, etc.
• mock-possum 5mo ago
  > Despite the arrogant claims of those who say science can “explain everything,” most phenomena, from thunderstorms to protein folding, escape our full understanding. We still can’t cure the flu or accurately predict the weather two weeks ahead. We do not know the basic physical laws of the universe. And even where we are confident that we know the basic underlying natural laws, we still cannot account for what they imply. I am confident that my bicycle diligently obeys the laws of particle physics, yet those laws are useless when it breaks down. To fix it, I ask a mechanic, not a particle physicist. Oh I hate this. We ‘still’ can’t do any of those things yet. Science provides a framework for discovering and coming to understand and yes eventually accurately predict the motions of the underlying systems that give rise to these phenomenons. And getting a mechanic to fix your bike is a matter of specialization, not some failure of science. Does anyone actually enjoy hearing other people talk this way? Who is this for?
• xtiansimon 5mo ago
  Among other philosophical conundrums such as… Why God Cannot Have Parts https://youtu.be/EZKADOYv-oc https://youtu.be/EZKADOYv-oc