5 ms·

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 w

by 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.
      - DubiousPusher 5mo ago
        We're approaching the definition of magic here aren't we. And I think this is what really divides this discussion. There is one set of people who insist that things must be explainable. And if something is explainable, it yields to science and is no longer magic. On the other side, you have people who insist that there are things which do not yield to science. So whether they admit it or not, they insist upon the existence of magic. In fact, the definition of magic might as well be, that which does not yield to explanation. The only question once you believe in magic is, what alternative epistemology do you accept? Scripture? Tradition? Divine revelation?
        dpark 5mo ago
        > On the other side, you have people who insist that there are things which do not yield to science. So whether they admit it or not, they insist upon the existence of magic. This is a really valuable framing for this sort of conversation.
        cameldrv 5mo ago
        Not at all. Saying that science does not yet explain some observed phenomenon is precisely how one starts to make scientific progress. Saying that qualia don’t exist because they are “magical” is like someone telling you lightning doesn’t exist before the understanding of electromagnetism.
- ordu 5mo ago
  Your arguments reminds me of logical loop. A implies B, B implies A. It doesn't mean that A and B are true. You have to be conscious to experience and to be conscious means to to experience. Maybe we are not conscious after all and do not experience? Maybe it is just a lie we are telling ourselves?
- n4r9 5mo ago
  I think the article has an interesting argument here. We also "experience" the sun going up and down in the sky. But actually this is an illusion of our vantage point on a spinning rock.
  - jffhn 5mo ago
    We don't experience the sun going up and down, we experience its direction changing relative to the horizontal plane, and it is not an illusion: it matches planetary motion. The mistake arises when interpreting the raw experience. Sensations don't lie. Another example: Metal feels colder than plastic, but the sensation is right again: you are loosing more heat when touching metal.
    - DubiousPusher 5mo ago
      But the sensation in a sense is a lie. Cold strictly speaking isn't real. And for much of human existence we spoke of it as if it was a substance due exactly to this specific sensatation.
    - n4r9 5mo ago
      Even so, the "quality" of an experience could be regarded as an interpretation of sensations.
      - n4r9 4mo ago
        And to add to this, sensations do lie. We hear voices that aren't there, things feel hot when they're cold, we feel stationary when we're hurtling around the sun at high speed. Our bodies are not built to sense the truth of the world, only to survive in it. Sometimes those things coincide, sometimes not.
- phkahler 5mo ago
  >> The main reason we believe consciousness exists is because we all experience it. What about the NPC meme? LLMs behave like NPCs, and some people seem no more conscious than an NPC (I didn't invent that meme).
  - jfyi 5mo ago
    NPC meme? No sir, we are a little more high brow around here. Around these parts we talk about p-zombies and solipsism! I'll bite though, do NPCs behave as if they believe they are conscious? If so, how do you know you aren't one of them?
  - capitol_ 5mo ago
    Isn't that just an insult people throw around? Or maybe some psychopath that tries to justify their worldview. I have never had an conversation with someone who seems like an NPC.
- kevin42 5mo ago
  “We experience it, therefore it exists” proves less than it seems. It proves there is an experience to explain. It does not prove that consciousness is what it appears to be from the inside. A mirage is still seen, but the thing it seems to show is not really there. Consciousness might be real in that same limited sense, while our folk model of it could be deeply wrong.
  - DubiousPusher 5mo ago
    Sleep paralysis entered the chat
  - fnordlord 5mo ago
    This is a really good point and something that I think is important to clarify at the very start of the discussion. In that way, I'm less interested in explaining consciousness than explaining experience. When I read this article, I felt like the author was only making his points by convoluting the two. By the end, I felt like, for an expert on the subject, I don't think he actually groks the fundamental point.
nemomarx 5mo ago
I've always thought that the mechanisms there create the experience or the illusion of a continuous self or something in that direction. When you've experienced it breaking down (automatic actions happening before you remember deciding to do them is a big contributor to the floaty dream like effect) you start to think maybe there's several systems and the observation and memory parts are just making sense of them. We assemble a self by keeping those memories and experience in a very particular way.
- visarga 5mo ago
  There is a very good explanation here - not what brains do, but what brains MUST do. Can we walk left and right at the same time? Can we drink coffee before brewing it? No. There is a bottleneck, a serial action bottleneck on the body. So the parallel brain activity must serialize on the output channel. It has to, or face ruin. If action is serialized in time by physical necessity, then information processing must also unify before action in order to support it. We must act as one -> we must cognize as one -> or perish. There is no way to allow each limb to do its own thing, or the brain not to decide what comes next in a unified way.
  - lanstin 5mo ago
    I doubt your conclusion that unified action needs unified mentation. One may take unified action without achieving unity of the contents of the brain. Acting with instantaneous regret if you will, flying by the seat of your pants, etc. The brain seems to be able to let competing subsystems alternate getting expressed in action.
    - visarga 5mo ago
      Not all brain activity is unified, I just claim it must unify on the output side - behavior and language. But this is not a brain or organism only problem. Even a cell must unify in crucial moments such as division and chemotaxis. A cell either divides or not, no mid point. To persist it must unify at some moments in its activity, yet it is a distributed system of many parts. The core principle here is - what is the unit of selection? the cell survives or not as a whole, the organism also survives or not as a whole, not organ by organ. Selection chooses the mechanisms that are viable.
mordymoop 5mo ago
Over time I've found that by far the highest ROI move in a consciousness debate is to simply ask "Oh, interesting. How do you know that?" and watch everyone on all sides flounder. It's one of the few places where otherwise smart people make confident statements that they don't even realize they can't support until they're asked to try. The intuitions are so strong that they seem to swamp reason. This has caused my own position, over time, to be a deep agnosticism about what's actually going on.
- lanstin 5mo ago
  Certainty would definitely appear to be premature when we don’t understand the physical characteristics or causes of consciousness. Hell, we don’t quite yet understand a cell in good mechanical detail, much less the full body/mind of a primate. Don’t know is a reasonable posture, but of course the investigators get enthused with hypothesis generation and testing. That is their job and their karma is to over generalize each useful model.
- GoblinSlayer 5mo ago
  Naturalistic theories tend to work better, and science is inching in towards the problem, so far it was naturalistic.
  - nradov 5mo ago
    Work better in what sense? Do naturalistic theories have more predictive power?
    - GoblinSlayer 5mo ago
      Predictive power, explanatory power, precision, consistency and matching evidence.
      - nradov 5mo ago
        Really? Do you have a citation for that?
saidnooneever 5mo ago
the proof of our lack of understanding is the countless things we can measure but cannot explain. Good on point response in my opinion. A lot of people want to close doors because those doors being open makes them uncomfortable. This is a mistake. If you want to be rigorous about what is then you need to be equally rigorous about what is not.
thomastjeffery 5mo ago
You are asking for evidence of absence, and that is the entire point. We don't understand brains, therefore this one specific theoretical feature (consciousness) must exist. Why should we stubbornly endorse a tautology for which there is no evidence? Experience is subjective. That's why we need science in the first place.
hallole 5mo ago
And for that reason, we'll never discover the soul. It will perpetually be that "something" that we are missing in our understanding of things. Assume for a minute that we have the basic picture correct, that there is no non-physical soul: your belief would have us searching for the rest of time! Isn't it best to suspend the question? There probably isn't any simple causative explanation (as in the example you provide). The brain is the most complex structure we know of and "self" arises from that deep complexity; this is an answer that I'm content with, as anything more in-depth / closer to the "metal" would quickly exceed my ability to understand it.
- rusk 5mo ago
  > we'll never discover the soul What if it reveals itself to us?
- robmccoll 5mo ago
  Maybe - let's assume that we could simulate a human brain to a high level of fidelity starting from a known good state and emulate its input and output. Do you think we could poke at it enough and ask the simulated person about their experience enough to discover the mechanisms behind what we experience as a soul? It's logistically and computationally insanely complex to pull off, but if we could build such a system, I don't see why we couldn't eventually figure it out in another thousand years' time (assuming we don't destroy ourselves or do something that sets back the evolution of technology massively between now and then).
  - LocalH 5mo ago
    MMAcevedo
  - pardon_me 5mo ago
    This is what humanity will inevitably end up trying to do with computing, and a great argument for why we could be in a simulation.
germandiago 5mo ago
My comment was going to say something similar. It starts like: hey, think this, it is time to think this full stop I say so.
KingFelix 5mo ago
Come to Consciousness conference, its where the hard problem started. https://cs2026.org/ https://cs2026.org/
yogthos 5mo ago
[dead]
klik99 5mo ago
This is why the comparison to people’s reactions to Darwin/evolution is just wrong - people had thought experimented things that looked like evolution, but when we were able to measure it we could start linking it to the real physical world. AFAIK consciousness is the only thing that we know for certain is real, but have no way of measuring it. People are still conscious when they lose sense of self, and blacking out or surgical sedatives might be related to memory more than losing consciousness, these affect qualities of consciousness but aren’t consciousness itself. This article reads like “I f’ing love science” level thinking, saying people are ignorant for thinking consciousness is not just a physical process, but zero understanding of scientific process.

by storus 5mo ago

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.
    - DubiousPusher 5mo ago
      We're approaching the definition of magic here aren't we. And I think this is what really divides this discussion. There is one set of people who insist that things must be explainable. And if something is explainable, it yields to science and is no longer magic. On the other side, you have people who insist that there are things which do not yield to science. So whether they admit it or not, they insist upon the existence of magic. In fact, the definition of magic might as well be, that which does not yield to explanation. The only question once you believe in magic is, what alternative epistemology do you accept? Scripture? Tradition? Divine revelation?
      - dpark 5mo ago
        > On the other side, you have people who insist that there are things which do not yield to science. So whether they admit it or not, they insist upon the existence of magic. This is a really valuable framing for this sort of conversation.
      - cameldrv 5mo ago
        Not at all. Saying that science does not yet explain some observed phenomenon is precisely how one starts to make scientific progress. Saying that qualia don’t exist because they are “magical” is like someone telling you lightning doesn’t exist before the understanding of electromagnetism.
ordu 5mo ago
Your arguments reminds me of logical loop. A implies B, B implies A. It doesn't mean that A and B are true. You have to be conscious to experience and to be conscious means to to experience. Maybe we are not conscious after all and do not experience? Maybe it is just a lie we are telling ourselves?
n4r9 5mo ago
I think the article has an interesting argument here. We also "experience" the sun going up and down in the sky. But actually this is an illusion of our vantage point on a spinning rock.
- jffhn 5mo ago
  We don't experience the sun going up and down, we experience its direction changing relative to the horizontal plane, and it is not an illusion: it matches planetary motion. The mistake arises when interpreting the raw experience. Sensations don't lie. Another example: Metal feels colder than plastic, but the sensation is right again: you are loosing more heat when touching metal.
  - DubiousPusher 5mo ago
    But the sensation in a sense is a lie. Cold strictly speaking isn't real. And for much of human existence we spoke of it as if it was a substance due exactly to this specific sensatation.
  - n4r9 5mo ago
    Even so, the "quality" of an experience could be regarded as an interpretation of sensations.
    - n4r9 4mo ago
      And to add to this, sensations do lie. We hear voices that aren't there, things feel hot when they're cold, we feel stationary when we're hurtling around the sun at high speed. Our bodies are not built to sense the truth of the world, only to survive in it. Sometimes those things coincide, sometimes not.
phkahler 5mo ago
>> The main reason we believe consciousness exists is because we all experience it. What about the NPC meme? LLMs behave like NPCs, and some people seem no more conscious than an NPC (I didn't invent that meme).
- jfyi 5mo ago
  NPC meme? No sir, we are a little more high brow around here. Around these parts we talk about p-zombies and solipsism! I'll bite though, do NPCs behave as if they believe they are conscious? If so, how do you know you aren't one of them?
- capitol_ 5mo ago
  Isn't that just an insult people throw around? Or maybe some psychopath that tries to justify their worldview. I have never had an conversation with someone who seems like an NPC.
kevin42 5mo ago
“We experience it, therefore it exists” proves less than it seems. It proves there is an experience to explain. It does not prove that consciousness is what it appears to be from the inside. A mirage is still seen, but the thing it seems to show is not really there. Consciousness might be real in that same limited sense, while our folk model of it could be deeply wrong.
- DubiousPusher 5mo ago
  Sleep paralysis entered the chat
- fnordlord 5mo ago
  This is a really good point and something that I think is important to clarify at the very start of the discussion. In that way, I'm less interested in explaining consciousness than explaining experience. When I read this article, I felt like the author was only making his points by convoluting the two. By the end, I felt like, for an expert on the subject, I don't think he actually groks the fundamental point.

nemomarx 5mo ago

I've always thought that the mechanisms there create the experience or the illusion of a continuous self or something in that direction. When you've experienced it breaking down (automatic actions happening before you remember deciding to do them is a big contributor to the floaty dream like effect) you start to think maybe there's several systems and the observation and memory parts are just making sense of them. We assemble a self by keeping those memories and experience in a very particular way.

visarga 5mo ago
There is a very good explanation here - not what brains do, but what brains MUST do. Can we walk left and right at the same time? Can we drink coffee before brewing it? No. There is a bottleneck, a serial action bottleneck on the body. So the parallel brain activity must serialize on the output channel. It has to, or face ruin. If action is serialized in time by physical necessity, then information processing must also unify before action in order to support it. We must act as one -> we must cognize as one -> or perish. There is no way to allow each limb to do its own thing, or the brain not to decide what comes next in a unified way.
- lanstin 5mo ago
  I doubt your conclusion that unified action needs unified mentation. One may take unified action without achieving unity of the contents of the brain. Acting with instantaneous regret if you will, flying by the seat of your pants, etc. The brain seems to be able to let competing subsystems alternate getting expressed in action.
  - visarga 5mo ago
    Not all brain activity is unified, I just claim it must unify on the output side - behavior and language. But this is not a brain or organism only problem. Even a cell must unify in crucial moments such as division and chemotaxis. A cell either divides or not, no mid point. To persist it must unify at some moments in its activity, yet it is a distributed system of many parts. The core principle here is - what is the unit of selection? the cell survives or not as a whole, the organism also survives or not as a whole, not organ by organ. Selection chooses the mechanisms that are viable.

mordymoop 5mo ago

Over time I've found that by far the highest ROI move in a consciousness debate is to simply ask "Oh, interesting. How do you know that?" and watch everyone on all sides flounder. It's one of the few places where otherwise smart people make confident statements that they don't even realize they can't support until they're asked to try. The intuitions are so strong that they seem to swamp reason. This has caused my own position, over time, to be a deep agnosticism about what's actually going on.

lanstin 5mo ago
Certainty would definitely appear to be premature when we don’t understand the physical characteristics or causes of consciousness. Hell, we don’t quite yet understand a cell in good mechanical detail, much less the full body/mind of a primate. Don’t know is a reasonable posture, but of course the investigators get enthused with hypothesis generation and testing. That is their job and their karma is to over generalize each useful model.
GoblinSlayer 5mo ago
Naturalistic theories tend to work better, and science is inching in towards the problem, so far it was naturalistic.
- nradov 5mo ago
  Work better in what sense? Do naturalistic theories have more predictive power?
  - GoblinSlayer 5mo ago
    Predictive power, explanatory power, precision, consistency and matching evidence.
    - nradov 5mo ago
      Really? Do you have a citation for that?

saidnooneever 5mo ago

the proof of our lack of understanding is the countless things we can measure but cannot explain. Good on point response in my opinion. A lot of people want to close doors because those doors being open makes them uncomfortable. This is a mistake. If you want to be rigorous about what is then you need to be equally rigorous about what is not.

thomastjeffery 5mo ago

You are asking for evidence of absence, and that is the entire point. We don't understand brains, therefore this one specific theoretical feature (consciousness) must exist. Why should we stubbornly endorse a tautology for which there is no evidence? Experience is subjective. That's why we need science in the first place.

hallole 5mo ago

And for that reason, we'll never discover the soul. It will perpetually be that "something" that we are missing in our understanding of things. Assume for a minute that we have the basic picture correct, that there is no non-physical soul: your belief would have us searching for the rest of time! Isn't it best to suspend the question? There probably isn't any simple causative explanation (as in the example you provide). The brain is the most complex structure we know of and "self" arises from that deep complexity; this is an answer that I'm content with, as anything more in-depth / closer to the "metal" would quickly exceed my ability to understand it.

rusk 5mo ago
> we'll never discover the soul What if it reveals itself to us?
robmccoll 5mo ago
Maybe - let's assume that we could simulate a human brain to a high level of fidelity starting from a known good state and emulate its input and output. Do you think we could poke at it enough and ask the simulated person about their experience enough to discover the mechanisms behind what we experience as a soul? It's logistically and computationally insanely complex to pull off, but if we could build such a system, I don't see why we couldn't eventually figure it out in another thousand years' time (assuming we don't destroy ourselves or do something that sets back the evolution of technology massively between now and then).
- LocalH 5mo ago
  MMAcevedo
- pardon_me 5mo ago
  This is what humanity will inevitably end up trying to do with computing, and a great argument for why we could be in a simulation.

germandiago 5mo ago

My comment was going to say something similar. It starts like: hey, think this, it is time to think this full stop I say so.

KingFelix 5mo ago

Come to Consciousness conference, its where the hard problem started. https://cs2026.org/ https://cs2026.org/

yogthos 5mo ago

[dead]

klik99 5mo ago

This is why the comparison to people’s reactions to Darwin/evolution is just wrong - people had thought experimented things that looked like evolution, but when we were able to measure it we could start linking it to the real physical world. AFAIK consciousness is the only thing that we know for certain is real, but have no way of measuring it. People are still conscious when they lose sense of self, and blacking out or surgical sedatives might be related to memory more than losing consciousness, these affect qualities of consciousness but aren’t consciousness itself. This article reads like “I f’ing love science” level thinking, saying people are ignorant for thinking consciousness is not just a physical process, but zero understanding of scientific process.