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It does not. Consciousness is the echo chamber of the quantum domain, temporally propagating through cognitive technology. Memory and temporal propagation (awa

It does not. Consciousness is the echo chamber of the quantum domain, temporally propagating through cognitive technology. Memory and temporal propagation (awareness) give consciousness something to do, which makes it topically interesting and addressable. The quantum domain has a tremendous information density which scales through entanglement (by the tens of thousands or even millions in our neurons) allowing the ultra high definition holographic experience we (many of us) are familiar with. When quantum holographic memory is understood, consciousness will be better understood. The qubit is a dead end, this will be the indicator of scientific progress.

AndrewKemendo 3mo ago
Do you have any references for these claims? I’m also curious how you define consciousness.
- mapontosevenths 3mo ago
  > I’m also curious how you define consciousness. This is what I came here for. Every article or commenter that attempts to deduce the roots of consciousness should first start by defining it. I have yet to see anyone even bother to seriously try. If I spent all my time trying to figure out the fundamental forces involved in floopityjoop, but refused to ever define exactly what a floopityjoop was, you would ignore me, laugh at me, or feel pity for me.
  - AndrewKemendo 3mo ago
    Hence why I ask In my experience, “intelligence” and “consciousness” are socially defined categories and can’t be viewed objectively There’s too much social weight on those to have a firm definition because the social implications are too grave and nobody is willing to give up their philosophy for a precise definition
    - mapontosevenths 3mo ago
      Agreed, and just to add to that... It's important. In the past many attempts to define who (or even what) is and is not conscious led to the exclusion of certain classes of human and animal, and from there to atrocity beyond measure. The p-zombie problem is not only fundamental, it may be the single most important question in all of philosophy and science from a "first do no harm" perspective. It's not some academic "Umm acshually". The definition MATTERS, and can lead to real world suffering for living beings at massive scale when we get it wrong. So these regularly scheduled "Mechanism For Consciousness Discovered" blog posts that fail to define it first aren't just bad science, they're actively dangerous. EDIT - To tie it back to this post - If we assume that working memory is involved in consciousness, we exclude people who lack short-term memory. I had a friend in high school who lost most of his due to a traumatic brain injury caused by a car accident. He was, in fact, a conscious being. Just... very, very forgetful and unable to cope well with novel situations.
      - d00d0ff000 3mo ago
        I define consciousness as “the inflection of the potential of existential being.” As my original comment suggests, I claim consciousness as the echo chamber of the quantum domain. Before you call it “quantum magic” understand that the “potential of existence” is the foundation of existential reality and we are “just inflecting” upon this through the electrochemical biotechnology of our brains. I propose all life and living systems are “of consciousness” however primitive, and memory, temporal awareness, even sense of self are holographic renderings within this domain.
        estearum 3mo ago
        Good luck drawing a line between life/living systems and otherwise. The panpsychist answer is (unfortunately) the only one that even remotely passes the sniff test.
        d00d0ff000 3mo ago
        No need. In another comment I mentioned a stone has dormant potential of consciousness, and life systems merely animate it. Someone else posted a decent link to the relationship of “holographic” memory and consciousness. I do not speak with that as my source though it is a relevant idea.
  - estearum 3mo ago
    Well consciousness has the "advantage"/curse of the fact that we all know it exists. We just can't prove it to each other.
    - mapontosevenths 3mo ago
      Nah. "Cogito, ergo sum" is obviously wrong if we think about it for even a moment. It's a thought terminating tautology at best. A) Just because there is thinking it does not follow that there is an "I" doing it. B) Perceiving something does not in and of itself prove that either the thing or the perciever are "real". Some things are real without being perceived, and some things are perceived that aren't real. C) Even if we grant the reality of the "I", What is the thing that is perceiving the "I" which is doing the thinking? We cant trust something that may be a faulty instrument to report on its own actions.So we can't actually be sure that we are thinking and not just falsly remembering that we once thought. See rootkits for an example. If we're starting from first principles (as Descartes intended) we immediately fail because we require an outside observer. D)Etc. Basically every major philosopher since Desacrtes has already had a go at this one. I'm sure there are better arguments against it out there already. These are just the few that spring to mind. Really, its just the place where Descartes gave up, not a universal truth of some sort.
      - estearum 3mo ago
        I didn’t argue “I think therefore I am.” I argued “experience therefore consciousness.” No “I” nor “think” nor “am” To use your language, perceiving something does in fact necessarily imply there is perception happening. You’re jumping to Descartes (who was wrong), I am pointing to Nagel (who is correct but not in a way that’s very helpful answering the corollary questions of consciousness) You presumably know consciousness exists at least in the case of you. I know it exists in the case of me. It’s probably reasonable for each of us to assume it exists in the case of each other.
        mapontosevenths 3mo ago
        > You presumably know consciousness exists at least in the case of you. Just because I "know" something, that doesn't make it true. Or to use the "experience therefore consciousness" version: Experiencing something doesn't imply that either the subject or object are objectively real. Humans regularly experience unreality (books, games, movies, hallucinations), and the assumption that you exist because you feel that you do is no more valid than the assumption that Mickey Mouse is real because you feel that you have seen him. To restate more directly, there can be no "objective" reality without others to validate it. Otherwise its only "subjective" reality. It's been a long time, but I think Hegel really misses the mark. (You mean Hegel rather than Nagel, right?) I think he argued against doubting your own perception, but anyone who has ever taken LSD, or met a mentally ill person, can tell you that there are miles between perception and reality. The way we percieve the self is unlikely to be any more reliable than the way we percieve Mickey Mouse.
__patchbit__ 3mo ago
Does living working memory bifurcate to logical and physical maps as happens to compute memory on kernel bring up after MMU and core coherence? That being the case an owl may know what it is like to be a bat.
- d00d0ff000 3mo ago
  The physical nervous system is one map, and the consciousness the “moment of continuity” (like a “moment of force” in physical systems). The memory (learned inference) is another map. Consciousness animates and iteratively influences in between. You can fantasize that you are an owl or a bat, doing so well enough can be quite convincing. Remember, wings are arms and hands (look at a skeletal picture, you will see what I mean.)
  - lambdaone 3mo ago
    I think you'd have great difficulty in doing either, as you are imagining what you think it might be like to be one of these animals are are almost certainly unable to encompass what they might feel it to be like; the case of bats is literally the subject of Thomas Nagel's What Is It Like to Be a Bat?
    - deleted 3mo ago
      [deleted]
lambdaone 3mo ago
> Consciousness is the echo chamber of the quantum domain [citation needed]
- bookofjoe 3mo ago
  FWIW the only place I EVER see the phrase "citation needed" is on HN. That's not a good or a bad thing: it's simply an observation.
  - analog31 3mo ago
    With apologies to the above post if I'm wrong, I've seen it as a polite way of saying, "bullshit."
    - mapontosevenths 3mo ago
      > I've seen it as a polite way of saying, "bullshit." Only if they can't provide a reliable citation.
  - mrec 3mo ago
    Pretty sure it originated with the Wikipedia annotation. See e.g. https://xkcd.com/285/ https://xkcd.com/285/ from 2007.
- mrec 3mo ago
  I've seen this bouncing around since the early 90s, with New Agey people like Danah Zohar, and probably predates even that. There never seemed to be a whole lot to it; not much more than "well, consciousness is weird, and quantum is weird, therefore consciousness is quantum". Or maybe "well, quantum is trendy, and I'd like to make a buck, therefore..."
  - DonaldFisk 3mo ago
    I'm unsure what to make of the post you're replying to, but the idea that there's a connexion between consciousness and quantum phenomena isn't just a New Age idea. Eugene Wigner wasn't New Agey, and he wrote Remarks on the Mind-Body Question, suggesting that wave function collapse only occurs when the consciousness of an an observer becomes aware of the result of a measurement, not the measuring apparatus, which is entangled with whatever is being measured, records it.
therobots927 3mo ago
Very interesting. Do you have any links to material along these lines?
- zulux 3mo ago
  It conjecture, but in my opinion there's something about our brain based on the evidence. Three pounds of meat in one human brain can do things an entire datacenter of AI can't. Like fold clothing.
  - therobots927 3mo ago
    Found something: https://philarchive.org/archive/FRAAQI https://philarchive.org/archive/FRAAQI
PaulDavisThe1st 3mo ago
Woo!

AndrewKemendo 3mo ago

Do you have any references for these claims? I’m also curious how you define consciousness.

mapontosevenths 3mo ago
> I’m also curious how you define consciousness. This is what I came here for. Every article or commenter that attempts to deduce the roots of consciousness should first start by defining it. I have yet to see anyone even bother to seriously try. If I spent all my time trying to figure out the fundamental forces involved in floopityjoop, but refused to ever define exactly what a floopityjoop was, you would ignore me, laugh at me, or feel pity for me.
- AndrewKemendo 3mo ago
  Hence why I ask In my experience, “intelligence” and “consciousness” are socially defined categories and can’t be viewed objectively There’s too much social weight on those to have a firm definition because the social implications are too grave and nobody is willing to give up their philosophy for a precise definition
  - mapontosevenths 3mo ago
    Agreed, and just to add to that... It's important. In the past many attempts to define who (or even what) is and is not conscious led to the exclusion of certain classes of human and animal, and from there to atrocity beyond measure. The p-zombie problem is not only fundamental, it may be the single most important question in all of philosophy and science from a "first do no harm" perspective. It's not some academic "Umm acshually". The definition MATTERS, and can lead to real world suffering for living beings at massive scale when we get it wrong. So these regularly scheduled "Mechanism For Consciousness Discovered" blog posts that fail to define it first aren't just bad science, they're actively dangerous. EDIT - To tie it back to this post - If we assume that working memory is involved in consciousness, we exclude people who lack short-term memory. I had a friend in high school who lost most of his due to a traumatic brain injury caused by a car accident. He was, in fact, a conscious being. Just... very, very forgetful and unable to cope well with novel situations.
    - d00d0ff000 3mo ago
      I define consciousness as “the inflection of the potential of existential being.” As my original comment suggests, I claim consciousness as the echo chamber of the quantum domain. Before you call it “quantum magic” understand that the “potential of existence” is the foundation of existential reality and we are “just inflecting” upon this through the electrochemical biotechnology of our brains. I propose all life and living systems are “of consciousness” however primitive, and memory, temporal awareness, even sense of self are holographic renderings within this domain.
      - estearum 3mo ago
        Good luck drawing a line between life/living systems and otherwise. The panpsychist answer is (unfortunately) the only one that even remotely passes the sniff test.
        d00d0ff000 3mo ago
        No need. In another comment I mentioned a stone has dormant potential of consciousness, and life systems merely animate it. Someone else posted a decent link to the relationship of “holographic” memory and consciousness. I do not speak with that as my source though it is a relevant idea.
- estearum 3mo ago
  Well consciousness has the "advantage"/curse of the fact that we all know it exists. We just can't prove it to each other.
  - mapontosevenths 3mo ago
    Nah. "Cogito, ergo sum" is obviously wrong if we think about it for even a moment. It's a thought terminating tautology at best. A) Just because there is thinking it does not follow that there is an "I" doing it. B) Perceiving something does not in and of itself prove that either the thing or the perciever are "real". Some things are real without being perceived, and some things are perceived that aren't real. C) Even if we grant the reality of the "I", What is the thing that is perceiving the "I" which is doing the thinking? We cant trust something that may be a faulty instrument to report on its own actions.So we can't actually be sure that we are thinking and not just falsly remembering that we once thought. See rootkits for an example. If we're starting from first principles (as Descartes intended) we immediately fail because we require an outside observer. D)Etc. Basically every major philosopher since Desacrtes has already had a go at this one. I'm sure there are better arguments against it out there already. These are just the few that spring to mind. Really, its just the place where Descartes gave up, not a universal truth of some sort.
    - estearum 3mo ago
      I didn’t argue “I think therefore I am.” I argued “experience therefore consciousness.” No “I” nor “think” nor “am” To use your language, perceiving something does in fact necessarily imply there is perception happening. You’re jumping to Descartes (who was wrong), I am pointing to Nagel (who is correct but not in a way that’s very helpful answering the corollary questions of consciousness) You presumably know consciousness exists at least in the case of you. I know it exists in the case of me. It’s probably reasonable for each of us to assume it exists in the case of each other.
      - mapontosevenths 3mo ago
        > You presumably know consciousness exists at least in the case of you. Just because I "know" something, that doesn't make it true. Or to use the "experience therefore consciousness" version: Experiencing something doesn't imply that either the subject or object are objectively real. Humans regularly experience unreality (books, games, movies, hallucinations), and the assumption that you exist because you feel that you do is no more valid than the assumption that Mickey Mouse is real because you feel that you have seen him. To restate more directly, there can be no "objective" reality without others to validate it. Otherwise its only "subjective" reality. It's been a long time, but I think Hegel really misses the mark. (You mean Hegel rather than Nagel, right?) I think he argued against doubting your own perception, but anyone who has ever taken LSD, or met a mentally ill person, can tell you that there are miles between perception and reality. The way we percieve the self is unlikely to be any more reliable than the way we percieve Mickey Mouse.

__patchbit__ 3mo ago

Does living working memory bifurcate to logical and physical maps as happens to compute memory on kernel bring up after MMU and core coherence? That being the case an owl may know what it is like to be a bat.

d00d0ff000 3mo ago
The physical nervous system is one map, and the consciousness the “moment of continuity” (like a “moment of force” in physical systems). The memory (learned inference) is another map. Consciousness animates and iteratively influences in between. You can fantasize that you are an owl or a bat, doing so well enough can be quite convincing. Remember, wings are arms and hands (look at a skeletal picture, you will see what I mean.)
- lambdaone 3mo ago
  I think you'd have great difficulty in doing either, as you are imagining what you think it might be like to be one of these animals are are almost certainly unable to encompass what they might feel it to be like; the case of bats is literally the subject of Thomas Nagel's What Is It Like to Be a Bat?
  - deleted 3mo ago
    [deleted]

lambdaone 3mo ago

> Consciousness is the echo chamber of the quantum domain [citation needed]

bookofjoe 3mo ago
FWIW the only place I EVER see the phrase "citation needed" is on HN. That's not a good or a bad thing: it's simply an observation.
- analog31 3mo ago
  With apologies to the above post if I'm wrong, I've seen it as a polite way of saying, "bullshit."
  - mapontosevenths 3mo ago
    > I've seen it as a polite way of saying, "bullshit." Only if they can't provide a reliable citation.
- mrec 3mo ago
  Pretty sure it originated with the Wikipedia annotation. See e.g. https://xkcd.com/285/ https://xkcd.com/285/ from 2007.
mrec 3mo ago
I've seen this bouncing around since the early 90s, with New Agey people like Danah Zohar, and probably predates even that. There never seemed to be a whole lot to it; not much more than "well, consciousness is weird, and quantum is weird, therefore consciousness is quantum". Or maybe "well, quantum is trendy, and I'd like to make a buck, therefore..."
- DonaldFisk 3mo ago
  I'm unsure what to make of the post you're replying to, but the idea that there's a connexion between consciousness and quantum phenomena isn't just a New Age idea. Eugene Wigner wasn't New Agey, and he wrote Remarks on the Mind-Body Question, suggesting that wave function collapse only occurs when the consciousness of an an observer becomes aware of the result of a measurement, not the measuring apparatus, which is entangled with whatever is being measured, records it.

therobots927 3mo ago

Very interesting. Do you have any links to material along these lines?

zulux 3mo ago
It conjecture, but in my opinion there's something about our brain based on the evidence. Three pounds of meat in one human brain can do things an entire datacenter of AI can't. Like fold clothing.
- therobots927 3mo ago
  Found something: https://philarchive.org/archive/FRAAQI https://philarchive.org/archive/FRAAQI

PaulDavisThe1st 3mo ago

Woo!