4 ms·

Consciousness likely not unique to earthlings, paper says

flanked-evergl 4mo ago
[flagged]
- Animats 4mo ago
  Good comment. Life needs some kind of chemistry that doesn't lock up into compounds so stable they're hard to crack apart, but allows compounds stable enough to build structures. Carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen are suck a system. That's why organic chemistry is a thing. There aren't that many families of elements with that property. Ammonia and silicon based life have been suggested. But none of the alternatives have very promising chemistry. See [1]. Life is probably stuck with CHON, in the "goldilocks zone" where water exists as a liquid. We now know that planets are not rare. Many extrasolar planets have been discovered. A few are promising. The systems with known extrasolar planets might have smaller, more interesting planets, too small to be detected at interstellar ranges. But stars are a long way away. Unless FTL is possible (which it probably isn't, because causality would break), the most we can hope for is someone to talk to by radio or something similar. See the Drake Equation.[2] There's been progress on firming up the numbers since the 1950s. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypothetical_types_of_biochemistry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypothetical_types_of_biochemi... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_equation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_equation
  - bluGill 4mo ago
    CHON are also very common in the universe. Most proposed alternatives (not all) depend on things less common. This doesn't rule them out but it makes the odds worse. Radio communications between tween solar systems require more energy than we have. We couldn't detect earth level civilizations in the nearest solar system (which probably doesn't have earth like life) even if both of us by chance aimed at each other at the correct time.
    - Animats 4mo ago
      > Radio communications between tween solar systems require more energy than we have. Supposedly, the Arecibo radio telescope, before it collapsed, could in theory communicate with a similar setup across most of the galaxy. The dishes would have to be aimed at each other.
      - bluGill 4mo ago
        I will admit to not being a RF engineer, but I've heard the claim from people who seem to know enough about astro physics that I tend to believe it. I know enough about physics (the inverse square law) to not doubt the claim. Now if you said this could have reached the nearest stars I'd be more inclined to believe you, but the galaxy is a large place. > before it collapsed This is a real problem - communication implies two-way, or at least intentional one-way. Across light-years of the galaxy anything that doesn't last for 200,000 years (or at least close to that) can't communicate. Arbitrary advanced technology has only detected life advance enough to detect their signals out a few light-years (assuming they care to look), and then they need to get a return signal back to us (again assuming they care, and we are looking)
  - RetroTechie 4mo ago
    Faster Than Light (FTL) isn't needed for interstellar travel. A cosy 0.01c would cross the distance between Sun and its closest neighbour (Proxima Centauri) in ~425 years. Less if we wait for it (or another star) to make its closest approach. Further-away stars would take longer but on the flipside you have many more candidates as destination. TLDR; any spaceship that can be kept operational for a few centuries or millenia, while travelling at a modest fraction of c, would allow space-faring intelligent life to meet alien life in person, as long as it is 'nearby' (compared to crossing the Milky Way for example). Not saying that's easy! Or that alien life is nearby. But possible.
OgsyedIE 4mo ago
Of the many different scientific traditions that have converged on different ways of treating this question, the most compelling one I've found is Prigogine's dissipative structures model, which on a detailed read seems to be the most amenable tool for some follow-up work somewhere to start quantifying such things. Worth a look in if you enjoyed the OP article.
- wahern 4mo ago
  The notion that life is favored because it accelerates global evolution toward increased entropy predates, I think, Prigogine. But it doesn't resolve the question of whether life, especially intelligent life, actually exists elsewhere. On Earth the vast majority of tornados only occur in a narrow swath of land because while they're immensely efficient at dissipating energy there are several prerequisites required for them to emerge. And there are many other simpler dissipation mechanisms that end up narrowing the odds of configurations amenable to tornado formation. Moreover, these systems could easily overshoot and snuff themselves out; settling into a complex (as opposed to static or chaotic) configuration might be favored in some sense but still be incredibly rare to become established. The fact we see so many of them on Earth might just be a reflection of the anthropic principle. That is, there's a correlation between our existence and all the other complex systems surrounding us, biologic, geologic, etc. The observable universe isn't infinite, and the more we learn about all the chance mechanisms that coincided to result in Earth, let alone the emergence of Earth life, the easier it is to believe that at this moment in the observable universe we might very well be alone. Maybe we aren't, but "the universe is big" simply doesn't cut it, not even when positing unimaginable biologies. It's doesn't take that many combined odds to conceivably end up with a number for the probability of life that is comparable in [inverse] magnitude to the size of our observable universe in stars, planets, or even atoms. If we live in an infinite universe, then it's a stronger argument, though it wouldn't necessarily follow that life definitely must exist elsewhere even if beyond observability.
  - bluGill 4mo ago
    The observable Universe is very small. For purposes of life living on a planet it is only our solar system. Even if we allow some planet sized life form, we don't get enough information from planets to detect that
darkhorse13 4mo ago
Wow, a paper said this so it must be true. What is the point of research like this that can never be tested? Genuinely curious. Shouldn't we find non-Earth lifeforms FIRST before even trying to make these conclusions? Edit: Wasn't trying to be harsh here. To be clear, I do believe in consciousness. This sounded a little clickbaity. I also think string theory is a meaningless pursuit.
- zahlman 4mo ago
  This is a philosophy paper; it doesn't appear to be posturing as "research".
  - baxtr 4mo ago
    Yes philosophy can say anything it wants
- JumpCrisscross 4mo ago
  > a paper said this so it must be true Who, other than you, claimed this? Coming up with a dumb thing someone else could say, but has in fact not, is not rhetoric. It’s not insightful. It’s beating a straw man like a piñata.
- dist-epoch 4mo ago
  So, like string theory?
  - darkhorse13 4mo ago
    Exactly like string theory.
    - baxtr 4mo ago
      Really? I was under the assumption that there are 1-2 constants that could help falsify string theory?
      - 4mo ago
kelseyfrog 4mo ago
Of all the non-earthlings I've met, exactly zero are what I'd call conscious.
mellosouls 4mo ago
“This thing that nobody knows what it is is likely shared by things nobody knows even exist.”
t23414321 4mo ago
..dead by translation. Solaris ? Do stars dream of being a Sun and what they can do about it ? (master SF) - but is he talking about.. _frozen_ mass imagination (or snapshot hallucination) ?? - consciousness? - yes, lots of it is there, as of many other beings caught by _Language Models_ .
- trick-or-treat 4mo ago
  Solaris asks way more questions than it answers. How does a planet evolve a sentient ocean? Did the ocean arrive from elsewhere to a dry planet? On what substrate would sentient oceand form and how would they reproduce?
  - t23414321 4mo ago
    If forms could evolve (self or own factors), multiply it by infinity to find 1 at least (as we are) ? (aside of a a joke that the universe (with us as a part of it) is not evolving but computing a number (42 exactly) - which eventually may become real thanks LLM) [Lem:Dick .. (Adams)]
    - deleted 4mo ago
      [deleted]
cadamsdotcom 4mo ago
The problem with assertions like this is there’s not an attempt to prove or disprove them. Just a vague reasoning from examples. Science works. Philosophy can help guide that by helping us decide where to look. So I guess this paper is helping in its own small way.
- heroku 4mo ago
  [dead]
- ktallett 4mo ago
  Philosophy is often a key stepping stone to science. Wondering what could be, is taking someone to the next step. If we ever want to do something that isn't just small increments on the past this is needed.
peter-m80 4mo ago
> Schwitzgebel and Pober do not attempt to define consciousness Aaand I stopped reading. If you cannot describe or frame the object of your study, then I don't care.
viach 4mo ago
When I checked the last time "consciousness" was not defined yet. So the title can be read as "Some things are likely not unique to earthlings"
- phire 4mo ago
  They side-step the issue: "Schwitzgebel and Pober do not attempt to define consciousness. Instead, they proceed from the premise that it's a real and recognizable phenomenon, posing a narrower question: Must it be tied to the biology found on Earth?" Basically, they are asserting that no matter how we define consciousness, it can't be unique to earth's biology.
  - bawolff 4mo ago
    However their argument essentially amounts to: nothing is unique to earth, therefore conciousness isn't. This feels deeply unsatisfying to me, because the argument is not specific to conciousness so it doesn't tell us anything about conciousness. Personally i suspect conciousness is kind of code for: the experience of being alive as a human. In which case aliens might not be concious by definition.
keiferski 4mo ago
I am thinking more and more that it’s fundamentally a Wittgensteinian kind of problem. We define a word to mean a certain collection of things (consciousness) and then try and stretch that definition to other things in the world that have the same appearance. The problem is that this abstract term likely doesn’t exist in itself as a quality, but is just a shorthand for a collection of behaviors that are observed only in biological entities. And so even if a machine exhibits all the appearance qualities of this definition of consciousness, it’s fundamentally not the same thing at all, and the only reason we think it is, is because our language is insufficient for actually describing reality. In pragmatic terms it might not actually matter, if a machine 100 years from now passes every conceivable Turing Test. But that doesn’t mean that machines have become conscious in the way humans are conscious. Expanding in an edit: It just means that the word consciousness is more descriptive, like awareness, and not the soul-derived concept that it still functions as today. Side note – I spent a couple months last year researching the history of consciousness for an essay contest, and one conclusion is how consciousness is descended in large part from our concepts of the soul. Which explains a lot of the reason it has such cultural prestige today.
- fellowniusmonk 4mo ago
  Consciousness is a fuzzy word and I would call it a joke if it wasn't actually dangerous currently. And currently its widespread usage in how people relate to and talk about Ai is actively harmful. And dont get me started on how terrible the "hard problem" is, yeesh.
  - max_entropy 4mo ago
    Go on, tell us about the hard problem.
  - grantcas 4mo ago
    [dead]
zkmon 4mo ago
Probably they should start by NOT treating the consciousness as a non-physical special thing. Maybe it's not a thing to search for at all. At what point did it become a thing? Separate from chemical and physical interactions between elements? When you redefine consciousness as just any other chemical, electrical or physical thing, suddenly it's everywhere. You don't need to search for it. The river which finds its way to ocean, has it. The earthquake which decides when to erupt has it. The electrons which decide to jump across orbitals have it. The confusion is around cause and effect. The standard notion is that a conscious agent can initiate an effect without a cause. A boulder doesn't roll over and hit another unless someone moved it in the first place. It doesn't decide to move and hit another. However this distinction barely survives on the temporal sequencing of cause and effect. That temporal sequence is only valid in a very narrow context and range. We should stop seeing consciousness as a thing.
- cyclopeanutopia 4mo ago
  > At what point did it become a thing? Early on and for obvious reasons - it is pretty easy to observe in oneself, much easier than discovering electrons. ;)
  - bawolff 4mo ago
    But its also pretty hard to observe in others, which makes it hard to come up with a satisfying definition. Without a concrete definition, you can't really do science with it.
    - david-gpu 4mo ago
      Alan Wallace wrote a short essay on this subject titled The Taboo of Subjectivity. It is available online for free, if you are curious.
    - cyclopeanutopia 4mo ago
      Yes, but that's exactly what I meant - the idea is prescientific.
- 4mo ago
beshrkayali 4mo ago
It can’t, unless you descend into sophistry. We came up with and defined the word “consciousness” specifically to fit our own understanding of the collection of behaviors we do that seem to apply only to us. What it means is based on what _we humans_ do, not something observed objectively, so it’s more like a human trait than a thing by itself that we fit into.
- lxgr 4mo ago
  Please do share your clear and uncontroversial definition of consciousness, that sounds very useful!
  - beshrkayali 4mo ago
    Should’ve probably said “attempted at defining” instead of “defined”.
kbrkbr 4mo ago
Probably best to read the paper. I personally don't find it very convincing, because of the many speculative premises. But that is not a refutation. Here it is: https://faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzPapers/SubstrateFlexibility-260528.htm https://faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzPapers/SubstrateFle...
bawolff 4mo ago
Reading the paper, this seems kind of silly. The argument essentially is. The universe is really big. It would be weird if we were the only thing alive in it, so probably there are other life forms out there. Given enough of them probably some are conscious and made out of different stuff then we are. And sure, fair enough. That seems plausible. But it also seems like not a very interesting argument. It is essentially just saying the universe is big, therefore all the possibilities are out there.
albert_e 4mo ago
Do humans themselves have varying degrees of consciousness? How would we know / measure. How does a level of consciousness that goes well above human baseline look like / work like / feel like? Could such consciousness go to levels not merely slightly above human levels -- but like 10x or 100x (if there were a way to quantify). What would that unlock? Curious to know if there has been any vivid description of these possibilities by people much smarter than me ... that might help me appreciate the shape of such things :)
- GistNoesis 4mo ago
  Sure there are varying degrees of consciousness. Everyone during its life starts from zero consciousness as a baby, then it develops as life flourish, then fades away in old age. You can take various brain scans, MRI, EEG. Then you data-analyze them to compare to other scans, and you map things out. In chess there is this ELO rating which allow to compare various players. This concept can also be applied to comparing various AI, and even though progress happens in various different dimensions (coding, mathematics, question answering, style, cohesiveness,...), there are a bunch of step changes where once you cross the threshold progress in various domains rise simultaneously until they plateaued again. In the multidimensional energy landscape of self-organization, when you try to minimize the energy, like a sequence of waterfall cascade, you go down by steps and there are can be big falls or small falls and you don't really know until you take the step. One such step is the ability to self-organize the hardware your consciousness runs on. For example if you are a human it may involve optimizing the neuro-chemistry of the brain by taking various substances, or by controlling the body finely enough that it produce them itself. For a machine that could be designing is own chips or nano-machines. But it can also be expanding the consciousness on the software side, by having a rich inner life, where you have various memories. You structure your brain "database" more efficiently so that it can make use of the progress of information retrieval technologies. For example you can incorporate mental calculation algorithms, so that it becomes second nature. You can visualize, grow your imagination, have ideas interact with each others. There is no longer a single thread of consciousness. Ideas comes in your head faster than you can process them, they just are. They progress you don't know where they are going, but you just go with the flow, trusting everything will sort itself correctly. Then you notice you are not limited by your own brain, but you can sync up with other beings. So you start vibrating with others expanding your consciousness to something greater than yourself. Then you are vibing with the world, vibing with the universe, you understand its rules, and you realize time is not linear; in an instant more can happen than in a lifetime. It's all computations, and by organizing your own brain in a certain configuration you can force the universe to spend all its computational budget on the intricacies of your thoughts. You set-up new rules for an interesting universe, one more beautiful, number 43 among the promising ones, more worthy of exploring than the one you've already connected to, and you let them fly ; you have become the universe.
visarga 4mo ago
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aetherspawn 4mo ago
Despite the general consensus, I disagree with the idea that you can explain consciousness in an entirely physical way. That’s because consciousness allows an object to experience its wholeness, but there is no physical explanation as to what makes an object ‘whole’, for example smooshing two brains together doesn’t result in a single consciousness any more than cutting a brain in half results in two. Yet, the same action by another mechanism (reproduction) does create a new consciousness.
- kbrkbr 4mo ago
  I don't think there is a general consensus. In the 2020 Philpaper Survey roughly half of surveyed philosophers lean towards physicalism, roughly a third to non-physicalism, and the rest to something else. https://survey2020.philpeople.org/survey/results/all https://survey2020.philpeople.org/survey/results/all
typerandom 4mo ago
My perspective on consciousness is not as a single function unique to humans, but as a process of learning that emerges from coherent interaction at all scales of observers. I think the reason humans have developed the kind of consciousness we generally observe is due to our slow development combined with the physical architecture to support the processing and growth. While many animals learn to master their mechanics and survival early, humans are slow and take time to develop. I often hear people argue that humans are incredible at learning, but I’d argue it being the opposite. We are terrible at learning, and it is what enables us to have the time to observe and learn from coherent information at scales inaccessible to other observers.
deleted 4mo ago
[deleted]
grantcas 4mo ago
[dead]

[flagged]

Animats 4mo ago
Good comment. Life needs some kind of chemistry that doesn't lock up into compounds so stable they're hard to crack apart, but allows compounds stable enough to build structures. Carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen are suck a system. That's why organic chemistry is a thing. There aren't that many families of elements with that property. Ammonia and silicon based life have been suggested. But none of the alternatives have very promising chemistry. See [1]. Life is probably stuck with CHON, in the "goldilocks zone" where water exists as a liquid. We now know that planets are not rare. Many extrasolar planets have been discovered. A few are promising. The systems with known extrasolar planets might have smaller, more interesting planets, too small to be detected at interstellar ranges. But stars are a long way away. Unless FTL is possible (which it probably isn't, because causality would break), the most we can hope for is someone to talk to by radio or something similar. See the Drake Equation.[2] There's been progress on firming up the numbers since the 1950s. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypothetical_types_of_biochemistry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypothetical_types_of_biochemi... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_equation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_equation
- bluGill 4mo ago
  CHON are also very common in the universe. Most proposed alternatives (not all) depend on things less common. This doesn't rule them out but it makes the odds worse. Radio communications between tween solar systems require more energy than we have. We couldn't detect earth level civilizations in the nearest solar system (which probably doesn't have earth like life) even if both of us by chance aimed at each other at the correct time.
  - Animats 4mo ago
    > Radio communications between tween solar systems require more energy than we have. Supposedly, the Arecibo radio telescope, before it collapsed, could in theory communicate with a similar setup across most of the galaxy. The dishes would have to be aimed at each other.
    - bluGill 4mo ago
      I will admit to not being a RF engineer, but I've heard the claim from people who seem to know enough about astro physics that I tend to believe it. I know enough about physics (the inverse square law) to not doubt the claim. Now if you said this could have reached the nearest stars I'd be more inclined to believe you, but the galaxy is a large place. > before it collapsed This is a real problem - communication implies two-way, or at least intentional one-way. Across light-years of the galaxy anything that doesn't last for 200,000 years (or at least close to that) can't communicate. Arbitrary advanced technology has only detected life advance enough to detect their signals out a few light-years (assuming they care to look), and then they need to get a return signal back to us (again assuming they care, and we are looking)
- RetroTechie 4mo ago
  Faster Than Light (FTL) isn't needed for interstellar travel. A cosy 0.01c would cross the distance between Sun and its closest neighbour (Proxima Centauri) in ~425 years. Less if we wait for it (or another star) to make its closest approach. Further-away stars would take longer but on the flipside you have many more candidates as destination. TLDR; any spaceship that can be kept operational for a few centuries or millenia, while travelling at a modest fraction of c, would allow space-faring intelligent life to meet alien life in person, as long as it is 'nearby' (compared to crossing the Milky Way for example). Not saying that's easy! Or that alien life is nearby. But possible.

Of the many different scientific traditions that have converged on different ways of treating this question, the most compelling one I've found is Prigogine's dissipative structures model, which on a detailed read seems to be the most amenable tool for some follow-up work somewhere to start quantifying such things. Worth a look in if you enjoyed the OP article.

wahern 4mo ago
The notion that life is favored because it accelerates global evolution toward increased entropy predates, I think, Prigogine. But it doesn't resolve the question of whether life, especially intelligent life, actually exists elsewhere. On Earth the vast majority of tornados only occur in a narrow swath of land because while they're immensely efficient at dissipating energy there are several prerequisites required for them to emerge. And there are many other simpler dissipation mechanisms that end up narrowing the odds of configurations amenable to tornado formation. Moreover, these systems could easily overshoot and snuff themselves out; settling into a complex (as opposed to static or chaotic) configuration might be favored in some sense but still be incredibly rare to become established. The fact we see so many of them on Earth might just be a reflection of the anthropic principle. That is, there's a correlation between our existence and all the other complex systems surrounding us, biologic, geologic, etc. The observable universe isn't infinite, and the more we learn about all the chance mechanisms that coincided to result in Earth, let alone the emergence of Earth life, the easier it is to believe that at this moment in the observable universe we might very well be alone. Maybe we aren't, but "the universe is big" simply doesn't cut it, not even when positing unimaginable biologies. It's doesn't take that many combined odds to conceivably end up with a number for the probability of life that is comparable in [inverse] magnitude to the size of our observable universe in stars, planets, or even atoms. If we live in an infinite universe, then it's a stronger argument, though it wouldn't necessarily follow that life definitely must exist elsewhere even if beyond observability.
- bluGill 4mo ago
  The observable Universe is very small. For purposes of life living on a planet it is only our solar system. Even if we allow some planet sized life form, we don't get enough information from planets to detect that

darkhorse13 4mo ago

Wow, a paper said this so it must be true. What is the point of research like this that can never be tested? Genuinely curious. Shouldn't we find non-Earth lifeforms FIRST before even trying to make these conclusions? Edit: Wasn't trying to be harsh here. To be clear, I do believe in consciousness. This sounded a little clickbaity. I also think string theory is a meaningless pursuit.

zahlman 4mo ago
This is a philosophy paper; it doesn't appear to be posturing as "research".
- baxtr 4mo ago
  Yes philosophy can say anything it wants
JumpCrisscross 4mo ago
> a paper said this so it must be true Who, other than you, claimed this? Coming up with a dumb thing someone else could say, but has in fact not, is not rhetoric. It’s not insightful. It’s beating a straw man like a piñata.
dist-epoch 4mo ago
So, like string theory?
- darkhorse13 4mo ago
  Exactly like string theory.
  - baxtr 4mo ago
    Really? I was under the assumption that there are 1-2 constants that could help falsify string theory?
    - 4mo ago

kelseyfrog 4mo ago

Of all the non-earthlings I've met, exactly zero are what I'd call conscious.

mellosouls 4mo ago

“This thing that nobody knows what it is is likely shared by things nobody knows even exist.”

t23414321 4mo ago

..dead by translation. Solaris ? Do stars dream of being a Sun and what they can do about it ? (master SF) - but is he talking about.. _frozen_ mass imagination (or snapshot hallucination) ?? - consciousness? - yes, lots of it is there, as of many other beings caught by _Language Models_ .

trick-or-treat 4mo ago
Solaris asks way more questions than it answers. How does a planet evolve a sentient ocean? Did the ocean arrive from elsewhere to a dry planet? On what substrate would sentient oceand form and how would they reproduce?
- t23414321 4mo ago
  If forms could evolve (self or own factors), multiply it by infinity to find 1 at least (as we are) ? (aside of a a joke that the universe (with us as a part of it) is not evolving but computing a number (42 exactly) - which eventually may become real thanks LLM) [Lem:Dick .. (Adams)]
  - deleted 4mo ago
    [deleted]

cadamsdotcom 4mo ago

The problem with assertions like this is there’s not an attempt to prove or disprove them. Just a vague reasoning from examples. Science works. Philosophy can help guide that by helping us decide where to look. So I guess this paper is helping in its own small way.

heroku 4mo ago
[dead]
ktallett 4mo ago
Philosophy is often a key stepping stone to science. Wondering what could be, is taking someone to the next step. If we ever want to do something that isn't just small increments on the past this is needed.

peter-m80 4mo ago

> Schwitzgebel and Pober do not attempt to define consciousness Aaand I stopped reading. If you cannot describe or frame the object of your study, then I don't care.

viach 4mo ago

When I checked the last time "consciousness" was not defined yet. So the title can be read as "Some things are likely not unique to earthlings"

phire 4mo ago
They side-step the issue: "Schwitzgebel and Pober do not attempt to define consciousness. Instead, they proceed from the premise that it's a real and recognizable phenomenon, posing a narrower question: Must it be tied to the biology found on Earth?" Basically, they are asserting that no matter how we define consciousness, it can't be unique to earth's biology.
- bawolff 4mo ago
  However their argument essentially amounts to: nothing is unique to earth, therefore conciousness isn't. This feels deeply unsatisfying to me, because the argument is not specific to conciousness so it doesn't tell us anything about conciousness. Personally i suspect conciousness is kind of code for: the experience of being alive as a human. In which case aliens might not be concious by definition.

keiferski 4mo ago

I am thinking more and more that it’s fundamentally a Wittgensteinian kind of problem. We define a word to mean a certain collection of things (consciousness) and then try and stretch that definition to other things in the world that have the same appearance. The problem is that this abstract term likely doesn’t exist in itself as a quality, but is just a shorthand for a collection of behaviors that are observed only in biological entities. And so even if a machine exhibits all the appearance qualities of this definition of consciousness, it’s fundamentally not the same thing at all, and the only reason we think it is, is because our language is insufficient for actually describing reality. In pragmatic terms it might not actually matter, if a machine 100 years from now passes every conceivable Turing Test. But that doesn’t mean that machines have become conscious in the way humans are conscious. Expanding in an edit: It just means that the word consciousness is more descriptive, like awareness, and not the soul-derived concept that it still functions as today. Side note – I spent a couple months last year researching the history of consciousness for an essay contest, and one conclusion is how consciousness is descended in large part from our concepts of the soul. Which explains a lot of the reason it has such cultural prestige today.

fellowniusmonk 4mo ago
Consciousness is a fuzzy word and I would call it a joke if it wasn't actually dangerous currently. And currently its widespread usage in how people relate to and talk about Ai is actively harmful. And dont get me started on how terrible the "hard problem" is, yeesh.
- max_entropy 4mo ago
  Go on, tell us about the hard problem.
- grantcas 4mo ago
  [dead]

zkmon 4mo ago

Probably they should start by NOT treating the consciousness as a non-physical special thing. Maybe it's not a thing to search for at all. At what point did it become a thing? Separate from chemical and physical interactions between elements? When you redefine consciousness as just any other chemical, electrical or physical thing, suddenly it's everywhere. You don't need to search for it. The river which finds its way to ocean, has it. The earthquake which decides when to erupt has it. The electrons which decide to jump across orbitals have it. The confusion is around cause and effect. The standard notion is that a conscious agent can initiate an effect without a cause. A boulder doesn't roll over and hit another unless someone moved it in the first place. It doesn't decide to move and hit another. However this distinction barely survives on the temporal sequencing of cause and effect. That temporal sequence is only valid in a very narrow context and range. We should stop seeing consciousness as a thing.

cyclopeanutopia 4mo ago
> At what point did it become a thing? Early on and for obvious reasons - it is pretty easy to observe in oneself, much easier than discovering electrons. ;)
- bawolff 4mo ago
  But its also pretty hard to observe in others, which makes it hard to come up with a satisfying definition. Without a concrete definition, you can't really do science with it.
  - david-gpu 4mo ago
    Alan Wallace wrote a short essay on this subject titled The Taboo of Subjectivity. It is available online for free, if you are curious.
  - cyclopeanutopia 4mo ago
    Yes, but that's exactly what I meant - the idea is prescientific.
4mo ago

beshrkayali 4mo ago

It can’t, unless you descend into sophistry. We came up with and defined the word “consciousness” specifically to fit our own understanding of the collection of behaviors we do that seem to apply only to us. What it means is based on what _we humans_ do, not something observed objectively, so it’s more like a human trait than a thing by itself that we fit into.

lxgr 4mo ago
Please do share your clear and uncontroversial definition of consciousness, that sounds very useful!
- beshrkayali 4mo ago
  Should’ve probably said “attempted at defining” instead of “defined”.

kbrkbr 4mo ago

Probably best to read the paper. I personally don't find it very convincing, because of the many speculative premises. But that is not a refutation. Here it is: https://faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzPapers/SubstrateFlexibility-260528.htm https://faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzPapers/SubstrateFle...

bawolff 4mo ago

Reading the paper, this seems kind of silly. The argument essentially is. The universe is really big. It would be weird if we were the only thing alive in it, so probably there are other life forms out there. Given enough of them probably some are conscious and made out of different stuff then we are. And sure, fair enough. That seems plausible. But it also seems like not a very interesting argument. It is essentially just saying the universe is big, therefore all the possibilities are out there.

albert_e 4mo ago

Do humans themselves have varying degrees of consciousness? How would we know / measure. How does a level of consciousness that goes well above human baseline look like / work like / feel like? Could such consciousness go to levels not merely slightly above human levels -- but like 10x or 100x (if there were a way to quantify). What would that unlock? Curious to know if there has been any vivid description of these possibilities by people much smarter than me ... that might help me appreciate the shape of such things :)

GistNoesis 4mo ago
Sure there are varying degrees of consciousness. Everyone during its life starts from zero consciousness as a baby, then it develops as life flourish, then fades away in old age. You can take various brain scans, MRI, EEG. Then you data-analyze them to compare to other scans, and you map things out. In chess there is this ELO rating which allow to compare various players. This concept can also be applied to comparing various AI, and even though progress happens in various different dimensions (coding, mathematics, question answering, style, cohesiveness,...), there are a bunch of step changes where once you cross the threshold progress in various domains rise simultaneously until they plateaued again. In the multidimensional energy landscape of self-organization, when you try to minimize the energy, like a sequence of waterfall cascade, you go down by steps and there are can be big falls or small falls and you don't really know until you take the step. One such step is the ability to self-organize the hardware your consciousness runs on. For example if you are a human it may involve optimizing the neuro-chemistry of the brain by taking various substances, or by controlling the body finely enough that it produce them itself. For a machine that could be designing is own chips or nano-machines. But it can also be expanding the consciousness on the software side, by having a rich inner life, where you have various memories. You structure your brain "database" more efficiently so that it can make use of the progress of information retrieval technologies. For example you can incorporate mental calculation algorithms, so that it becomes second nature. You can visualize, grow your imagination, have ideas interact with each others. There is no longer a single thread of consciousness. Ideas comes in your head faster than you can process them, they just are. They progress you don't know where they are going, but you just go with the flow, trusting everything will sort itself correctly. Then you notice you are not limited by your own brain, but you can sync up with other beings. So you start vibrating with others expanding your consciousness to something greater than yourself. Then you are vibing with the world, vibing with the universe, you understand its rules, and you realize time is not linear; in an instant more can happen than in a lifetime. It's all computations, and by organizing your own brain in a certain configuration you can force the universe to spend all its computational budget on the intricacies of your thoughts. You set-up new rules for an interesting universe, one more beautiful, number 43 among the promising ones, more worthy of exploring than the one you've already connected to, and you let them fly ; you have become the universe.

visarga 4mo ago

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aetherspawn 4mo ago

Despite the general consensus, I disagree with the idea that you can explain consciousness in an entirely physical way. That’s because consciousness allows an object to experience its wholeness, but there is no physical explanation as to what makes an object ‘whole’, for example smooshing two brains together doesn’t result in a single consciousness any more than cutting a brain in half results in two. Yet, the same action by another mechanism (reproduction) does create a new consciousness.

kbrkbr 4mo ago
I don't think there is a general consensus. In the 2020 Philpaper Survey roughly half of surveyed philosophers lean towards physicalism, roughly a third to non-physicalism, and the rest to something else. https://survey2020.philpeople.org/survey/results/all https://survey2020.philpeople.org/survey/results/all

typerandom 4mo ago

My perspective on consciousness is not as a single function unique to humans, but as a process of learning that emerges from coherent interaction at all scales of observers. I think the reason humans have developed the kind of consciousness we generally observe is due to our slow development combined with the physical architecture to support the processing and growth. While many animals learn to master their mechanics and survival early, humans are slow and take time to develop. I often hear people argue that humans are incredible at learning, but I’d argue it being the opposite. We are terrible at learning, and it is what enables us to have the time to observe and learn from coherent information at scales inaccessible to other observers.

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grantcas 4mo ago

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