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Rovelli is arguing (I think) that we need to fundamentally view consciousness as a natural phenomenon - albeit one that is extremely complex and poorly understo

• 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?
  • trick-or-treat 5mo ago
    I think it's the same thing. You can't have consciousness without qualia and vice versa.
    • justonceokay 5mo ago
      Ok pain might be a bad example because a robot may not have a sense of it borne of evolution. But what about “red”? If I make a robot that 99.9% correctly identifies red objects, then I think it is fair to me to say it has a concept of “redness”. Some philosophers believe that our human emotional connection to redness is special. These are the people talking about qualia. My belief after much reading is that it is not special. I /do/ believe that the human ability to tie our senses so deeply together synthetically and into our emotional and memory is special. My robot cannot write a poem about how the redness of a flower reminds them of their mother’s funeral. But now we are talking a matter of degrees, not qualia.
      • daseiner1 5mo ago
        Isn't what makes the experience of love special the experience of love? a robot can hold hands and kiss and bring flowers home far more efficiently than i can. is that what love is? A robot CAN write a poem about how the redness of a flower reminds them of their mother’s funeral. But the outward signal of grief is not evidence of an internal experience of it.
        • fragmede 5mo ago
          What's really a head trip is that I don't actually know another human is experiencing grief either. They could be a sociopath and not actually feel emotions, but are pretending to in order to benefit them in some way.
          • daseiner1 5mo ago
            bingo
• H8crilA 5mo ago
  I am pretty sure I am not conscious, and this seems to solve the entire problem that other people have.
  • roncesvalles 5mo ago
    My pet theory is that I don't think all humans are conscious (in other words, some perfectly cognitively normal-seeming people are just automatons without an inner experience, like plants or LLMs). Mainly motivated by the fact that a lot of people report not having an inner monologue, and other little hints that I've picked up over the years. The "inner experience" might be totally optional to fitness, like green eyes.
    • trick-or-treat 5mo ago
      That's called solipsism. I went through it as a lad, I think it's not uncommon.
      • H8crilA 5mo ago
        I assure you that I am not conscious (and a human, not an LLM). Therefore at least partial solipsism is true.
        • randallsquared 5mo ago
          If you aren't conscious, and if no one else is, either (in spite of their reports of such), the solipsism still need not be true. It's a reach, I guess.
          • jfyi 5mo ago
            I am not sure I am prepared for solipsgnosticism to be a thing.
        • Tier2Capital 5mo ago
          what do you mean youre not conscious?
• bambax 5mo ago
  I never quite understood what we mean by "consciousness" but I find fascinating that most modern philosophers who describe themselves as materialists / non religious can argue in the same sentence that there is something special and extra-natural about the human experience. It's one or the other: either nature is all there is, and therefore, consciousness is a purely natural phenomenon, that we can investigate, and probably eventually replicate, and can't deny to other beings or to machines upfront; OR there is something outside reality that we might as well call God. I'm strongly in the former camp, but I don't have issues with the latter one. What upsets me is the inconsistency of those who try to support both ideas at the same time. They shouldn't be allowed to have it both ways.
  • twak 5mo ago
    I've yet to find a falsifiable definition of consciousness. I do believe in intelligence (which is measured against a particular task) and ego (which inflates the self over the other).
  • energy123 5mo ago
    I don't know anyone who supports both ideas at the same time. Are you saying that philosophers do? Most philosophers are materialists or computational functionalists, while being monists. This means they aren't dualists, and it means they do not adopt the supernatural explanation. But they are careful not to rule out dualism. There's this pattern I've observed in discussions about philosophy. First there's a rejection of philosophy as silly and misguided, followed by a rediscovery of the same concepts that philosophers have developed, but under a new ad-hoc and less precise language. Congratulations, you're a philosopher.
    • mikk14 5mo ago
      I don't know if this is discussed by actual serious philosophers, but consider the issue of "mind uploading." I have seen very staunch monists seriously discussing that, if you were to produce a complete digital copy of your brain -- copying any possible information to the most minute synapse -- then you effectively "uploaded" yourself into a computer and can live a digital life. These people believe this while at the same time considering dualism so ridiculous as to laugh dualists out of the room. The evident problem being that "mind uploading" is the most dualistic possible position to take. A real monist would easily see that by doing mind uploading you have just created a clone that is a whole separate entity from yourself and it is not yourself.
• themgt 5mo ago
  The problem is that consciousness is a philosophical invention ... If you accept consciousness is a thing you end up in this weird tautological state "The Moon" is a philosophical invention, and yet The Moon is a natural phenomenon.
• beaker52 5mo ago
  So many people appear to be mesmerised by their own place in the physical world, and taken by this powerful idea that the physical world is the source of it all, giving rise to everything through physical laws and processes, like our brain, a product of quaint physical processes, giving rise to consciousness. To me, that idea seems entirely back-to-front. To me, it appears obvious to me that I am having a conscious experience from which the physical world and all its laws and processes, emerge. What’s even more interesting, is the narrative of that physical world. I am witnessing a physical world that is more often than not, trying to convince me that everything that exists has come from it - perhaps poetically in an attempt to ground (confine) me in it, grounding me in the belief that I am only alive inside the confines of what we call the physical world, where the truth is otherwise. I simply don’t buy that my consciousness comes from my physical brain, it seems more likely that my brain comes from my consciousness - whatever that is. I am not impressed with the idea that the conscious experience is special and is in need of explanation. Instead, I propose that the physical world is the more special and more interesting part, that needs an explanation. Not to describe all the physical laws and processes, but to explain why it exists at all. And that is done, not by distracting ourselves with searching the physical corners for answer, but instead by exploring the question of why anything would have given rise to a world like this in the first place. And that, right there, is the truly difficult question, which is answered by peering over our shoulder into the abyss, from which we all had to run from to arrive here.
  • 986aignan 5mo ago
    There's a hard problem in either case, I think. If the mind is supported by or comes from the physical world, then the hard question is "why is there something it is like to be me"? If the physical world is supported by or comes from the mind, then the hard question is "why is the product of my thoughts sometimes incredibly malleable and other times not at all?" From a pragmatic perspective, there are certain events that behave the same whether the mind came first and is somehow restricted in certain capacities, or if the natural world came first and is imposing itself on the mind (through whatever supports it). For instance, falling down stairs is going to hurt in either case. If the physical world exists independently, that happens because you either are or have a body which is also subject to its laws. If there's a mental monism, that happens because you can't shape all your thoughts, and those thoughts you can't shape act on some other part of you in a way that injures what you think of as your body.
• amelius 5mo ago
  > 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. How can you say that? It would be very interesting to know how to build robots that love their work, versus ones that hate their work. Not because it makes a practical difference to us, but because of ethics.
• prmph 5mo ago
  Consciousness the the fundamental reality; it is the only thing we know for sure. I know for sure what I am perceiving. Forget about if it is a simulation or not: it is still what I am perceiving. There is nothing else I can be sure of. So you are correct that it is, in some sense, un-explorable. However, if the above is the reason, then nothing else is explorable also; you cannot prove that we are not in a simulation, and in a sense it does not matter. If you accept that we assume we are not in a simulation and the knowledge we have matters, then consciousness is also open to exploration, and it is not only a philosophical thing. There are several hard questions about consciousness that are meaningful in this frame: - Why do some things appear to be conscious and other not so? - Is there only one consciousness in the universe, or multiple? - Is consciousness local and embodied, or not? - Would restoring the physical substrate of consciousness (if possible) lead to the same consciousness, or an identical one? Does this distinction between "same" and "identical" consciousnesses even make sense? Etc
  • kaashif 5mo ago
    Why does whether we're in a simulation or not matter for whether anything is explorable? You can explore how the simulation works, there's just some other layer you can't explore. Or maybe you can somehow. When you look at the stars, are they real or a simulation in your brain? Does that mean you can't explore them?
    • LoganDark 5mo ago
      > When you look at the stars, are they real or a simulation in your brain? This is unknowable.
      • smackeyacky 5mo ago
        It is knowable isn’t it? We know our brains play a variety of tricks to get a cohesive view out of two wildly complicated but deeply flawed meat sensors. That fits the definition of a simulation.
        • 5mo ago
• sebastianconcpt 5mo ago
  Is not undefinable. Unless you have an incomplete model to understand the universe. Which is exactly our case.
• staticassertion 5mo ago
  That's like saying that "water" is a philosophical invention and so if you accept that water is a thing then you've put it into a special category. You can derive consciousness as a somewhat obvious conclusion of empirical study of behaviors, we have multiple fields of study that lay out cognitive function and criteria.
• freedomben 5mo ago
  I've been debating consciousness for many years as a layman, not an expert, but a layman who has read a lot of scholarly books on the subject. In my experience, the majority of people who take the position that consciousness is something special to humans are nearly always coming from a religious background and viewing it through a religious lens. This makes sense, as if we reduce consciousness to physical reality, then the implications to free will become quite clear and devastating against it being a thing. This essentially destroys a lot of religions which are fundamentally based on humans having free will. Detailing the full chain of thought would take quite a bit of space, but the quick answer is that the ability for free will is hiding from us if it actually exists. Many people reach for quantum mechanics and its source of randomness as room for consciousness to exist that gives us free will, but the problem there is neurologically we operate at a far larger size than quantum effects would be measured. There's also no way to control the outcome of quantum events as it is truly random. So one would need to show how our neurological physiological minds could manipulate quantum space, which of course they can't. At the level our brains operate, we are well into deterministic physics. While they absolutely deny this, the impression I get is that they are making a god of the gaps argument. Consciousness is something we don't understand yet, and can't even really define well as many people here have pointed out, so to them it doesn't feel like a classic God of the gaps. For that reason, I find your comment above quite interesting. I personally find philosophy to be a fascinating and useful tool, but it definitely has a tendency to mislead, especially in areas where hard science can inform. Of course there's an entire debate around the philosophy of science itself, but that feels off topic here.
  • crdrost 5mo ago
    The thing that Rovelli is arguing against (well -- not really arguing -- more, "stubbornly sticking his head in the sand" against) is not really a position that is held by a bunch of religious people trying to create a weird "god-of-the-gaps style argument" as you characterize. Like, that may have been your experience -- not contradicting you on who you've met and what you've talked with them about etc. ... but what he's talking about is a position argued by a lot of philosophers and including those who have no particular metaphysical commitments. Rovelli here does a lot worse than Dennett's "quining qualia" paper where he tries to get people to be really specific about "what are these qualia like" and finds that they're so hard to embed in language, to symbolically represent, that maybe he-as-philosopher can discharge his duty to be engaged-with-phenomenalism by just kinda sticking his fingers in his ears and saying "what phenomena?! you haven't clearly defined the phenomena!" But someone like Searle who has no bones about himself being an atheist and, while he didn't like to describe himself as "materialist" because of the history of that term[1] he would acknowledge that it was close to his basic position. And I want to be clear that he views consciousness as a scientifically solvable problem. He doesn't think we've solved it yet but he thinks the philosophical problems are ultimately tractable and if we solve them and get out of the way you'll get a fine science of consciousness someday. Nevertheless, he's very clear about agreeing with the fact that these qualia are important to the discussion and he would laugh at you for trying to leave them out -- he'd say, now you're trying to make a science of consciousness, by leaving out the consciousness. And of course you don't think there's any science left to be done at that point and "well, it's all deterministic physics, we understand it all, nothing to be done here." So like if you want to read his take, a book is Freedom and Neurobiology, but for this comment I just want to point out that him simultaneously believing that there are phenomena of experience, and believing that there is no God, are two beliefs that are not uncommon for philosophers to hold together. 1. There's kind of no way to very briefly make the point since you kind of need to be hit in the face with a sledgehammer about it. So Searle views Descartes as erroneously trying to package up the world into two realms -- mind properties or substances on this hand, physical properties or substances on that hand -- and insisting that they can't overlap. And then Descartes' legacy was that you had camps which said 'those mind properties aren't real, only the physical properties' (materialism) and 'those physical properties aren't real, only the mind properties' (idealism) but coming from the same mistaken beginning. Searle would point to the score of a football game and say 'now is that physical because it's represented in terms of lights on the scoreboard, or is it mental because it's represented in terms of the thoughts of the referee, what about all the people on both sides who think the referee made the wrong decision -- something which, remember, by definition the actual referee cannot do; they are the final authority -- and they believe that the score is "really" some other number distinct from the score represented on the lights; and what if none of these people are "right" in the sense that if a perfectly perceptive model referee could have made all of the scoring calls in the game according to the rules on the books, then the score would have actually included an event that everyone watching thought was unambiguously non-scoring but actually it was completely legal and valid. But here I-the-philosopher come into all of this absolute mess and I want to carve out a clear boolean yes/no classification, mental vs physical, material vs ideal, which is it -- the problem, was not that I counted to two distinct possibilities, but that I thought counting those possibilities was a meaningful way to decompose the problem in the first place.
• 986aignan 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. But you can view consciousness as a natural phenomenon without being reductionist. In a Hempel's Dilemma-like turn, you could say something like: "consciousness, like mass, is a property of arrangements of matter and exists wherever matter is arranged in a particular way. Disrupt the arrangement, as with anesthetics, and the consciousness goes away." You end up with something like integrated information theory: https://iep.utm.edu/integrated-information-theory-of-consciousness/ https://iep.utm.edu/integrated-information-theory-of-conscio... From such a perspective, the article's byline, "Consciousness is not separate from the physical world — our “soul” is of the same nature as our body and any other phenomenon of the world", is true. Like mass or charge, consciousness is merely another property or feature of stuff of combinations of matter that exist in the physical universe. But there's still a "hard problem of consciousness" with such a theory. The distinguishing feature of qualia-like consciousness remains: it can only be properly verified from the inside. Researchers may devise theories that say "if property X holds, then the lump of matter is conscious" (like Tononi is doing with IIT). And the theory they develop may be quite tight - for all actions where it predicts temporary loss of consciousness, people exposed to the experiment say "I wasn't conscious at that time". But until they can solve the hard problem - being able to detect the what-its-like from the outside, the hard problem remains. Though, as you're saying, if you just want something that predicts observable outcomes, then consciousness theories that say "this anesthetic-like thing produces what, to the outside observer, is indistinguishable from loss of consciousness", might be good enough.
• tim333 5mo ago
  >consciousness is a philosophical invention Does that mean when a boxer is knocked unconscious we should call a philosopher to fix it?
• NoMoreNicksLeft 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. There is no such need. If we view the idea of consciousness as a childish delusion and suppose that no one has consciousness at all... that we are animals with behaviors that explain all the actions we take, we can model the world just as effectively as if we are the vessels of marvelous souls that are inexplicable and magical. Theology was the traditional venue of these absurdist arguments about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. But at least they had an excuse, they never pretended that it was science or that the debate was grounded in anything other than religious belief.
• markhahn 5mo ago
  I'm mystified why you think there is anything to accept about consciousness. Or are you purely talking about it being a "thing"? Yes, that's relevant to how Rovelli is treating dualism (as a made-up, unevidenced claim). I'm always mystified why consciousness is so often claimed to be undefinable.
• fsckboy 5mo ago
  >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) whether or not matter was continuous and could be divided forever by repeated halving, or if there were "atoms" was a philosophical puzzle more than 2000 years before "we" found the answer. That it was "atoms" was one of the 2000y.o. hypotheses. same with dividing time and distance. It's ridiculous to dispense with good hypotheses. we know that consciousness exists before any other thing. We don't even know that the so-called physical world actually exists, only that we we consciously think we observe it, but we can wake up believing dreams or psychotic imaginings. How can you enjoy watching The Matrix, and yet walk out so smug about you knowing the answers before they've even been found? I personally do not believe in the material universe. All of our theories and descriptions and empricism about it proves that it is mathematical only. All that exists can be (and is) explained by math (and perhaps some computer science in the sense that there is state, and math doesn't require state) I call upon rational STEM types to reject the material universe the way you wish to dispense with consciousness. Consciousness, like math, is immaterial, and we have more evidence for immateriality than we do for materiality. When our hypothetical hands touch each other in a handshake, you would even point out that on a quantum level, nothing touches anything.
• jatora 5mo ago
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• perfmode 5mo ago
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