10 ms·

No, really—consciousness is worth thinking about

155 points by duncancarroll 13y ago

wittysense 13y ago
Consciousness can be modeled, and the brain can be modeled. The models can be correlated, and this is useful to us to get on the same page about what constitutes reality as a picture of "things hanging together in harmony" (compossibility). Consciousness is most important to us as a set of observation statements about us, and it is solely up to us to decide how to interpret those statements. This can be done for other species, and this will tell us whether or not our thought-patterns are actually indicative of right-thinking, thus deserving to be repeated across larger regions of space-time. I recommend a read of http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/369939.Philosophical_Foundations_of_Neuroscience http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/369939.Philosophical_Foun....
EGreg 13y ago
I think David Chalmers would agree with you wholeheartedly: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness Even Patricia Churchland thinks there is a lot here. Philosophers of the mind have dedicated their whole professional careers and lives to thinking about this.
- mistercow 13y ago
  I think David Chalmers might also notice that this poster is tearing apart a straw man. The "Sophomoric philosophy" quote, for example, was not someone saying "it's sophomoric to think that consciousness is worth thinking about". S/he was saying that the arguments given by the OP were sophomoric. In fact, a tiny minority of the comments in that thread were dismissive of consciousness as an interesting topic of thought. Only one of the comments quoted in this post could reasonably be interpreted as dismissive, but even that one had interesting points to make.
Xcelerate 13y ago
I upvoted the original article not necessarily because I thought it was particularly well-written, but because I looked forward to seeing what the HN comments about the article would say. Nevertheless, I left to go somewhere before I had a chance to peruse them. I think in a conversation about consciousness, it's very important to define exactly what it is you're talking about. I'm not a neuroscientist, but I get the impression that within the field, "consciousness" refers to specific patterns of brain activity. (Some neuroscientist on here can correct me if I'm wrong.) These patterns can be be studied experimentally, simulated computationally, or theorized about mathematically. All fall well into the modern definition of what science encompasses. Testable predictions about reality can be made and understood. Then the author of the first piece uses a different word a little later in the article: > Experience - "why does the feeling which accompanies awareness of sensory information exist at all?" This, in my opinion, is a whole different idea. As a scientist myself (my research is in molecular-dynamics and quantum monte carlo), "experience" is not something that can be assessed at all by the scientific method. Many people argue that "experience" doesn't even exist (see the concept of p-zombies http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie). As for me personally, I'm certain that it does, for if you removed all of my faculties and senses with the exception of leaving my mind intact, I would still experience existence. The curious thing about this is that there's no way for me to tell whether other people (you all) exist in the same way that I do, not even in theory. How do I know if you actually experience existence or are simply a collection of particles following the same rules of physics that everything else does? For then if I was you, I wouldn't be me anymore. One prerequisite for something being scientific is that it must be testable, and this sort of thing is not. So it's not science and I don't waste time conflating it with what actually is science. It's an interesting philosophical question. It's been debated for centuries, and it will continue to be debated for centuries (along the same lines as qualia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualia) but there will never be any kind of resolution to the issue.
- TelmoMenezes 13y ago
  Neuroscience hasn't been able to produce a single theory on the origin of consciousness, unless one accepts "it emerges from neural activity" as an explanation. Consciousness appears to be the ultimate mystery. There is something very fundamental about it that we don't understand at all. This makes a lot of people uncomfortable, especially the type of people that would like to turn Science into a religion. We just don't know, and it's intellectually dishonest to pretend otherwise.
hjw 13y ago
I personally don't spend a large amount of time thinking about consciousness because I question the practicality. The subject matter is so dense, and like other(s) have stated, philosophers have dedicated their entire lives to pondering the issue. Frankly it sometimes upsets me when I do put an extensive amount of time into it and don't end up coming up with anything conclusive; it is depressing. There is (obviously) a incredible amount of ambiguity surrounding the subject, and there is something about this particular issue that is unnerving. On the other hand if you can stomach the subject matter it is very stimulating, unfortunately it does not lead to concrete conclusions.
kepano 13y ago
> "What discourages me here is that the overall tone of the HN commenters is: Get with the program. Instead of acknowledging that it is an open question and saying something like, “Interesting hypothesis, my own thoughts are that X, Y, Z, but have you read A, B, or C, which indicate Q…”, the response is: (chuckle) Consciousness? We solved that, didn’t you get the memo?" Amen. We need to stop letting the comments devolve into such a miasma and use each story as a jumping off point for intelligent conversation -- why can't we be friends? Continuing on the meta-topic at hand... A flaw that seems to occur in many intelligent people's minds is that as soon as we're able to form an opinion on a particular subject, we assume everyone else has too. Let's take a moment to appreciate that we don't all have state-of-the-art knowledge on every single topic. Our aim should be to help each other move further along, not shoot down attempts to learn.
- oblique63 13y ago
  > why can't we be friends? Indeed. Here, have an upvote to counteract the downvotes. It looks like this thread is heading to be derailed just as much as the last one unfortunately. HN is cool when it's about concrete subjects like tech/programming/business, but anything more abstract than that is really unnerving to watch unfold around here, and I'm sure we both wish it wasn't so. Honestly, the only reason I even comment on HN is to try and invoke these sorts of underrepresented viewpoints into conversation, but it's quite overwhelming to even try sometimes.
Gravityloss 13y ago
Everybody keeps getting the Schrödinger's cat experiment 100% backwards. It was created by Schrödinger to highlight how absurd the interpretation of quantum mechanics was at that time. Since then, even the Copenhagen interpretation basically says that the "observation" happens already at the Geiger counter: "Analysis of an actual experiment found that measurement alone (for example by a Geiger counter) is sufficient to collapse a quantum wave function before there is any conscious observation of the measurement" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schr%C3%B6dinger%27s_cat#Copenhagen_interpretation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schr%C3%B6dinger%27s_cat#Copenh... Consciousness might be worth thinking about. If it exists independently of the brain, it still must have effects on the brain, to have effects on human actions. These effects on the brain could be measurable. "This voltage here went up for an unknown reason". Further, it pushes the question to another unobservable "magical" world. So, the consciousness exists in another world which is not directly measurable. Can we measure it indirectly? What is the structure of consciousness in the astral plane or however you are going to call it? If the whole goal of arguing that the consciousness exists in the astral plane is that "we can't study it", then that sounds a bit non-serious.
- mcguire 13y ago
  I once had a friend who described a RPG scenario in a world in which "science doesn't work". My response was, "Wait, science is, by definition, figuring out, by whatever means, what works and what does not, whatever that means." Postulating that science doesn't work, or that "we can't study it", is going to result in a radically odd universe.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- Dylan16807 13y ago
  The cat experiment is a simplification. It doesn't matter that it was created to show the absurdity. People are not getting it wrong. All you need to know at the end is that the bigger / more energy a system has, the less time it can stay superimposed before collapsing by itself into one state. For anything macro-scale this timeline is basically zero.
mistercow 13y ago
So my comment got quoted. Neat. I'd like to respond to: > My response: who said anything about metaphysical? Well, the original author did. The entire article is, at its core, an argument for dualism. Dualism is a metaphysical theory. As for the accusation that I intended to imply that consciousness was a solved problem, all I can say is "What?" Seriously, how did you get that from what I said? The problem with the article, and the reason that people responded negatively (although, I think, for the most part thoughtfully), is not that everybody thinks the problem of consciousness is easy, or that it has been solved. It's that the arguments presented were weak and not particularly interesting or novel. I agree that discussion on HN should be thoughtful and polite. But I don't think that means we should be constantly patting each other on the back and blowing up each other's egos. I also don't really think the quote mining here was helpful. Here's the comment that was quoted simply as "Not a useful concept": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6195854 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6195854 Huh, it actually looks like that comment went on to bring up the concept of zombies, and linked to further reading. I guess quoting that part of the comment wouldn't have supported your indignant outrage though. Finally, the position that consciousness is not a useful concept is an important part of this discussion. How can we even have a meaningful conversation about consciousness without first addressing whether what we're talking about is real?
oblique63 13y ago
> I respectfully submit that this attitude should be considered harmful, for several reasons, not the least of which is that it stifles intellectual curiosity into a subject that is still an open book Indeed. It is quite discerning to see smart people fighting against what they believe to be anti-intellectualism with a fair share of anti-intellectualism of their own. I believe it might have more to do with a lack of exposure to varied subjects rather than a definite lack of intellectual curiosity in general however. Because many hackers are quite intellectually curious in their own domain, yet can still be susceptible to being as cynical and myopic as religious fundamentalists in other areas for some reason. The quality of thinking critically doesn't always seem to transcend domains, so I'm guessing it's a side-effect of living in a filtered environment beyond some developmental milestone of a person's curiosity. The string of comments in this other recent thread showcases this type of odd adherence to lack of understanding quite nicely: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6194276 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6194276 It really is odd how when philosophy is explicitly brought up, it is generally labeled as a useless endeavor, yet in most other discussions you see philosophical questions being raised all the time with the intention of using them as 'appeals to ambiguousness', when (as you mentioned) most of these questions have already been asked and thoroughly answered by philosophers ages ago. Not that there's anything wrong in not knowing about this, but clearly there's an interest to know these types of answers that arises organically, which makes the dismissal of philosophy an ultimately misguided exercise in cognitive dissonance. Throw in all the (literally ancient) logical fallacies you see being thrown around amongst smart, well-educated people, and it just makes the whole situation even more confusing. While I admittedly haven't read deeply enough into the psychology behind the Meyer-Briggs personality types, they do define and elaborate on types of people that could logically lead to these kinds of odd views. The easiest example is of the classic INTP vs INTJ types, both of which are strikingly similar, yet supposedly differ in one general crucial area. INTP's take all the input they can about the world and evolve their framework of understanding around it, while INTJ's supposedly form their elaborate framework of understanding first, then explore their inputs that correspond to it. I'm only somewhat partial to this explanation because I line up as a perfect INTP on all counts, but it honestly might as well be astrology at this point for all I know. Still a fun thought experiment though. EDIT: I realize that most on HN like speaking in more concrete terms, such as about the neurological basis for the notions of 'consciousness' and all that, however abstract argumentation and analysis does have use when talking about the act of argumentation itself. So I hope those who downvoted me at least provide an explanation within that context, because I am admittedly curious about what other perspectives there are on this matter.
dglittle 13y ago
it's so exciting to me that this community has some interest in consciousness. my background is 'hacker', but looking forward, I think consciousness is highly relevant (soon, we really will be able to hack our own brains, and when that happens, I think we'll care a lot about consciousness theory). anyway, I've written some blog posts with some thoughts on this topic that I'll throw into the mix: http://realgl.blogspot.com/2012/12/consciousness.html http://realgl.blogspot.com/2012/12/consciousness.html http://realgl.blogspot.com/2012/06/dimension-of-interpretation.html http://realgl.blogspot.com/2012/06/dimension-of-interpretati... (note that these posts were written maybe six months ago)
- tocomment 13y ago
  Interesting reading. I like your writing style it's very clear and easy to understand even though these are complex concepts.
gems 13y ago
I tend to be dismissive of the philosophical conversation. I think what will resolve the question is scientific (biological) study. Maybe math/cs theorists (AI) will get there first. But I am almost certain that no philosophical conversation we can have will give me an insight about our cognition.
vonsydov 13y ago
What's most interesting to me is how every few years (and every few decades sometime back) we're able to rationalize away certain kinds of subjective phenomena. Will we eventually reach a point where we completely STOP considering pure awareness as a problem...don't know...I guess nobody knows. But this kind of thing happens every so often where a large amount of people stop taking something seriously. At this point e.g. existence of an anthropomorphic god.
test-it 13y ago
OK, what's your definition of consciousness? Most animals, even single celled, need to have some way to handle the separation between "me" and "the rest of the world". I look at say my cat - it definitely has this concept somewhere in its brain circuitry. What human has is just more neurons.
- tatumizer 13y ago
  If single-cell organism is conscious, and each cell of our body is a "single cell", it immediately follows from here that "our" consciousness is in fact consciousness of a certain, very specialized, cell which resides somewhere in our body. Maybe it lives in the brain, maybe elsewhere, but it's a single cell nonetheless.
  - jongraehl 13y ago
    It doesn't follow - the type of consciousness we experience could be different. Though if you were saying that it's absurd to call single cell 'conscious' in the sense that human brains are, then I agree.
    - tatumizer 13y ago
      I really think every cell is conscious, and whatever we believe to be "our" consciousness comes from a single cell. I am not alone in this opinion: http://www.ucl.ac.uk/~regfjxe/awnew.htm http://www.ucl.ac.uk/~regfjxe/awnew.htm (though I came up with this trivial idea independently, and later found the article by googling) This ME-cell gets inputs from other cells obvioously.
      - Dylan16807 13y ago
        What happens when that cell dies? Lots of neurons die, it must happen all the time.
        tatumizer 13y ago
negamax 13y ago
I think it's worth adding to this thread that Buddha in his teachings said, eye has eye consiousness, ear, tongue, mind.. has their consiousness. He described consiousness as one of the five aggregates of human state. I never could wrap my head around the concept that awakening means also to see consciousness as empty.
- Attilaa 13y ago
  Beautiful. Thanks for linking in Buddha's teachings.
pknight 13y ago
I don't know why people don't think about this topic more, especially if you are curious person. A very interesting line of research that could have profound implications on science and our understanding of consciousness is being done by Radin et al. Specifically he's looking deeper at the possible role of consciousness and the collapsing of the wave in quantum theory with some really interesting repeatable experiments. He's taken the classic double slit experiment and has been testing to see whether conscious observers can affect the results merely by focusing their attention. So far the results are positive. Here's one paper: http://www.deanradin.com/papers/Physics%20Essays%20Radin%20final.pdf http://www.deanradin.com/papers/Physics%20Essays%20Radin%20f...
anigbrowl 13y ago
Personally I lean towards the idea of consciousness as an emergent phenomenon, ie closer to Hofstadter than Searle (for anyone who has wondered exactly what Godel, Escher, Bach is about, it's essentially a long argument for strong AI). However, I'm not sure about this; the main reason I can't subscribe to Searle's point of view is that he's trying to prove a negative, and I'd rather not know the answer than handwave one. I thought Carson's article was a bit fluffy and lacking focus, but then it was meant to provoke discussion and debate rather than offer a final answer. By far the most intriguing counter-proposal to the conventional wisdom is the late Julian Jaynes' The origin of consciousness in the breakdown of the bicameral mind which is such a monumentally good book that it's worth reading even if it is entirely wrong.
- dylangs1030 13y ago
  I never came across The Origin of Consciousness - what makes it "monumentally good" in your opinion?
  - anigbrowl 13y ago
    Oh dear, I can't easily sum it up in a couple of sentences. It's just a completely different way of thinking about how the mind works, the construction of personal identity, and the interaction between the individual and the rest of the world as to induce an acute sense of vertigo if you've grown up taking the Cartesian model for granted. There's a summary at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Origin_of_Consciousness_in_the_Breakdown_of_the_Bicameral_Mind http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Origin_of_Consciousness_in_... but relying on the summary is like me telling you that Beethoven's 5th symphony is in C minor, opens with a distinctive motif, and is generally quite dramatic sounding...all true, but absolutely nothing like the experience of actually listening to it. The book provided me with a completely different model for examination of the world, which is pretty unusual. While I don't feel wholly committed to Jaynes' model, I've found it enormously useful, in the same way as Understanding Media.
rasengan0 13y ago
For argument's sake: http://youtu.be/JTN9Nx8VYtk http://youtu.be/JTN9Nx8VYtk take on multiple perspectives and we can enjoy some fruits of the discussion
bhitov 13y ago
This article is attacking a strawman. The original article was dismissed not for merely discussing consciousness but for doing it nonsensically.
incompatible 13y ago
My opinion is that consciousness is an aspect of self-aware thought, and arises from the physical operation of the brain. There's no reason to think that a computer couldn't be conscious, given the right programming, and perhaps far more conscious than a human, since it could be aware of every aspect of its own operation. Since consciousness is an aspect of thought, it ceases to exist when thought stops, such as when you go to sleep or when you die. A new consciousness will be created if you wake up. A corollary is that I don't think science fiction ideas such as teleportation or mind transfer into a machine give any philosophical problems. A new consciousness is created when the newly created body/software starts to think, the same way that it's created when you wake up in the morning.
jdietrich 13y ago
If you believe in the existence of consciousness, what would prove to you that your qualitative experience is fundamentally no different to the state of a Turing machine? What would persuade you that what is called "consciousness" is of no special interest? OP states that "[consciousness is] a situation where a root cause is murky and escapes testability", which is simply special pleading. If you cannot test your hypothesis, what is more likely - that you have discovered a completely unique and mysterious phenomenon, or that your hypothesis is inadequate? It appears to me that the whole argument is predisposed upon that sort of special pleading. We have no clear evidence for the existence of consciousness, but it must exist because my subjective perception tells me it does. That perception different from the subjective perception of god or auras or the buddha-nature because... it just is. Bluntly, go away and come back when you have a null hypothesis.
- benched 13y ago
  Do you yourself experience subjective awareness? Why? And what does that subjective awareness have to do with a Turing machine?
- Tloewald 13y ago
  > but it must exist because my subjective perception tells me it does. What is there besides one's own subjective perception? Hello! This is a figment of your imagination calling.
- RivieraKid 13y ago
  Some people get so used to the idea that science explains everything, that they became completely blind to opposing views. It's hardwired deeply into their brains. That's how I explain to myself this kind of blindness I witness in every discussion about consciousness. Why do I feel pain when the atoms in my brain are in a specific configuration? Current state-of-the-art physical models can't possibly explain that. And it's even impossible to describe what feeling of pain is in physical terms. (No, I don't mean neural activity during pain, I mean the feeling of pain.) Every physical theory is based solely on consciouss experience. Everything we know about the world is through consciousness.
lnanek2 13y ago
Russians have kept dog heads alive and reacting with nothing attached by medical support machines. French have chopped off heads and had the person react to voice commands. Plenty of people have broken their neck and still been mentally there. Claiming consciousness does not come from the brain is just silly nonsense from before we had modern biology. Early philosophers thought the brain was for cooling blood. Even if you want to make up quantum superposition nonsense or whatever other big words you can find the place it is occurring is still inarguably the brain. It's OK to go talk about useless, meaningless, non-diagnostic bullshit after that. But you should realize you are just being religious and not talking about anything worthwhile that then has meaning toward physical structures. You should no longer talk about the brain after that because you are just throwing in physical terms to try to get people who would otherwise dismiss you to pay attention.
bglusman 13y ago
On my mobile so haven't had time to read all the comments or finish original article, but I agree, consciousness is worth thinking about, and trying to understand scientifically/rigorously. Many people are doing so but in particular in my research this one known as Integrated Information Theory[1] is a strong candidate, or precursor to such a candidate, and I'd encourage anyone intereated in the question or in advancing discussion of this proposed language and theory to do so[2]. Maybe I'm using the citation brackets wrong there though, apologies, I'm on a bus and it's dark and I'm tired :-) [1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_information_theory http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_information_theory [2]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6197184 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6197184
benched 13y ago
You cannot reduce or hand-wave consciousness away by calling it illusory, or by reducing it to neural activity. You can try, but you'll just be stringing words together to make nonsense. Every one of us experiences consciousness - subjectivity, qualitative awareness, 'what it is like to be a me' - directly. We gain one type of knowledge about consciousness by studying and poking the brain, and by observing people with abnormal brains. But that can only take us part of the way. We gain another kind of knowledge about consciousness by making subjectivity into an object. We can do that via means such as meditation, LSD, DMT, mushrooms, marijuana, some types of physical exertion, and perhaps more esoteric means like astral travel, or involuntarily by near-death experiences. These give insights by allowing us to become aware of awareness, to perturb, or to side-step normal consciousness.
runeks 13y ago
I suspect that we cannot define what consciousness is because we are consciousness. Only an observer outside a system can say what that system is. An entity cannot observe itself. The expression "experiencing consciousness" makes as little sense as "seeing vision" or "tasting flavor". Experiencing is consciousness, seeing is vision and tasting is flavor.
- Attilaa 13y ago
  Thank You. I'm glad someone said this. Edit: Alan Watts talks in depth about these matters. Although these explanations are not scientific or falsifiable -- it's an interesting attempt at understanding our own views of consciousness. Just because the feelings of love are not falsifiable, does not mean that it does not weave a great story that one tells themselves to keep sane.
calhoun137 13y ago
Since we are doing another meta-discussion on how supposedly nasty the comment section is sometimes, I'd like to say I don't have a problem with the tone of the comments at all, and I for one would be really sad if people started pulling their punches. The extremely high degree of criticism found in the comments is actually something I value very highly about this community. One of the things I love about the comment section is that people treat each other like adults who are capable of handling criticism. This isn't the office, this is HN. Not being able to handle criticism is a debilitating personality trait for someone who wants to achieve a high level of success in any sort of intellectual pursuit; and that is the reason why I strongly disagree with the desire on the part of some to change this aspect of the community.
- wpietri 13y ago
  Criticism and nastiness are orthogonal. Indeed, I think effective criticism is bound up with kindness. I know the times I've been an ass while criticizing somebody aren't about fixing the problem; they're about me looking smart at somebody else's expense. At best, I'm making them work past my obnoxiousness to get to the hopefully valuable bits. At worst, they discard the criticism as pure meanness. On the other hand, if I'm really delivering criticism because I'd like someone to get better, then it usually works best when I make it easy to see that I'm on their side.
- RivieraKid 13y ago
  I think what you're saying is quite stupid. I often find HN discussions... not sure how to describe it... I guess I just don't like many of the commenters for some unconscious reason. It could be: passive-agressiveness, people who are not emotionally mature (pg), overall negativity, stupid people who try to sound smart. Or something else. The atmosphere on other online communities is more positive, which is a good thing. You can disagree without being negative. I also noticed that for some strange unconsciouss reason, I really dislike people who use cliché phrases like: "Just to play devil's advocate." or "X and Y are orthogonal". (This comment is intentionally quite negative because you sound like an adult capable of taking criticism.)
  - 13y ago
mcguire 13y ago
For anyone interested in quantum mechanics and consciousness, I recommend Scott Aaronson's book Quantum Computing Since Democritus; the chapters on Penrose are worth the price of admission. His blog, Shtetl-Optimized[1], is also a good read (and I think the book appeared there first). On a different subject, recently there were a spasm of interest in fMRI studies that showed that "free" choices could be predicted based on neural activity well before a "conscious choice" was made.[2][3][4] The general consensus seemed to be "Hah! Take that, free will!" My take on the results were that they were hardly a surprise, if consciousness is an activity of the brain. You should no more expect to make a conscious decision prior to displaying brain activity relating to the decision than you should expect to perceive a flash of light before the light bulb is lit. It would not necessarily have any negative implications for the existence of free will; those experiments are simply exploring the mechanism of free will. On the other hand, I believe they do kind of imply that consciousness is a product of the jello in your noggin. Either that or there are some funky delays involved. Now, as for the third buttock: if consciousness doesn’t come from the brain, how does it work, exactly? I'd like some mechanism with my philosophy, thanks. Presumably, if I'm waving my arms around, you can trace the motor neuron activity from my appendages, up my spinal cord, and into my brain. But "and then a miracle occurs" is a pretty uninteresting way to connect that with the universe deciding that jazz hands are necessary. [1] http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/ http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/ [2] http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2008/04/mind_decision http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2008/04/mind_d... [3] http://www.nature.com/news/2011/110831/full/477023a.html http://www.nature.com/news/2011/110831/full/477023a.html [4] http://scienceblogs.com/cognitivedaily/2009/09/03/free-choice-may-not-be-as-free/ http://scienceblogs.com/cognitivedaily/2009/09/03/free-choic...
aufreak3 13y ago
I didn't come across the HN post when the original article was posted. I think the original article has many warning signs of "sophomoric" thinking to warrant rapid dismissal. The first big bold warning sign is this - "After reading and listening to David Chalmers, I came to realize that there is an intelligent argument that supports the idea that consciousness does not emerge from the brain. <big-n-bold>Quantum Mechanics</big-n-bold>" Invoking the "magic" and "mysterious" quantum mechanics to understand and explain something that isn't even defined in the article is, indeed, "sophomoric philosophy". In the original article, you'll also find this regarding the Schrodinger's cat "paradox" - "Many physicists today think the many-worlds theory resolves this paradox by stating that there are actually infinitely many universes, some in which you are dead and some in which you are living, and that once the quantum trigger is measured/observed, a specific universe is followed." Plain wrong. The "many worlds" is not a "theory", but an interpretation of quantum mechanics. It does not add any new physical mechanisms over and above what we already have in quantum mechanics - i.e. there is no "once a quantum trigger is measured/observed" in the many worlds interpretation. All these universes exist. Period. The problem of "observation" in quantum mechanics is being discussed here without even a mention of "decoherence". AFAIK, the unexplained part of quantum mechanics to date is the Born probabilities - i.e. why does the likelihood of observing an event correspond to the magnitude square of the amplitude we calculate for it. There are some recent insights into this, but I believe this is still unexplained. The original thing that the article sought to explore is whether it is possible that consciousness does not come from the brain. If that is indeed the primary point to be explored in this essay, the question to be asked is what does "come from the brain" mean? When a current passes through a memory circuit, it toggles from 0 to 1. What does it mean to say this "comes from the circuit"? Does is not also "come from the current"? We thus reach a point where all we can say is "shut up and compute", for we've fallen into the trappings of everyday language. edit: typos.
bittired 13y ago
Great post. I personally think that people that reply indicating that anyone who doesn't believe in the traditional sciences, not including Philosophy but rather using our "accepted body of Physiological and Psychiatric knowledge" as truth, are one step away from Asperger's. I do not mean that in a derogatory sense, since many with Asperger's are highly functioning, but their tendency to clinch onto mathematics and incomplete (but widely accepted) science and use it as the answer for everything is childish. I believe that our universe (the entirety, beyond what we experience) is not completely "rational", but some just cannot accept that. We would not be where we are today without Philosophers like Plato, Socrates, and Aristotle. However, if a conservative talk show host came along saying the same thing as these philosophers, they would attempt to beat him/her down for being an idiot. There is much to be learned by thinking outside of the box and trying to understand others' points of view. I'm a conservative-leaning moderate and independent (U.S.). I actually listen to both sides of the story (or more if possible), and then make up my mind which works with my existing belief system and where I can improve, knowing that both of them are biased and probably neither are completely right or wrong. I'm not better than anyone else, but I get frustrated, as it is farcical how one-sided conversations here can be, and how little people give and come to terms with each other.
- bittired 13y ago
  Not sure why I'm surprised I got -1'd, but I'm guessing it is because someone wanted to prove my point?
  - verbin217 13y ago
    Well making sweeping generalizations about groups of people is usually seen as offensive. Then again, I say that as a person diagnosed with aspergers so my opinion of what is and isn't offensive is obviously suspect ;). I didn't downmod you though and i wouldn't have even if i had the karma. Negative stereotypes regarding aspergers are too prevalent to really blame on individuals at this point. I agree with you about the world not necessarily being entirely rational. I see rationality as a subjective position from which to perceive reality. Another is the self and its intrinsic interests. This is where I seem to fail in my communication with others. This may be a wildly arrogant assertion but I think most people are insanely self obsessed. From this I can understand why empathy is seen as being absolutely necessary. Frankly, I think most people with autism spectrum disorders actually lack the self obsession that would normally be redirected onto others via empathy. This causes a failure to appropriately acknowledge others and with tragic irony a typical individual will ascribe their behavior to self-obsession. Anyway, you mention the learning acquired from considering others points of view. The thought process I've found most rewarding in this regard is to first build up the person's opinion as much as I can and then to attack any weaknesses. The attack is intended to elicit a defense which I cannot conceive. The ultimate aim being to fully understand their position and its legitimacy. Needless to say, this often becomes unpleasant. Likely stemming from my pathological lack of tact :(. The important thing to note is that there are people (at least one person) who are detail oriented. If you want them to "give and come to terms with each other" then you're going to have to endure some ostensible pettifogging. All that being said, there's some straight up nastiness here on HN and much of it is exactly the condescending appeal to immature sciences that you describe. Oh also, just a note: it's likely that Socrates had aspergers or something similar.
shuaib 13y ago
If all my memories are copied over to a humanoid robot, and that robot claims to be me, given access to all my memories. Is he really me? What if the actual me is standing right next to it? Are there now two me? Or is the robot just faking it? But if it's the latter, how do we know I am not faking someone else's consciousness (i.e. not the robot, but I is the one faking)?
dschiptsov 13y ago
Some very bright people, notably Chomsky, Minsky and Kurzweil are advocating utilitarian, "mechanical" nature of the mind, which is much more useful than any religious/mysterious crap. Very crudely, language is just neural network training (due to repeated exposure) and pattern matching on what what was trained. This oversimplified model nevertheless could explain the whole phenomena very well. We do not memorizing grammars, for example, but we are able to distinguish well-formed sentence form nonsense just because it doesn't match the common structure we were trained. People who started to study their second language as adult would tell you that sentences are not deliberately "constructed" according to the memorized rules as it is when we begin to getting familiar with a new language, but "emerge by itself" after some training. So we have no grammars inside our brain, but a mechanism to train to build up one. The consciousness, according to the same views, is nothing but a "current working buffer" for ongoing processes, and as some "activity" exceeds some threshold it acquires a "focus" , as if we are "switching" to it. Minsky have stated many times, that it will require years until people will start using such vocabulary from the world of complex systems in attempts to describe what's going instead of Froidian or common-sense memes. There is a course based on his Society of Mind book on MIT Open Courseware - very nice talks to listen.
sveme 13y ago
I agree to some extent with your assessment, however, I also had some issues with the original post and could understand the anger of people that delved (much) deeper into the subject. I am not expecting a blog post to be a well-thought and rigorous scientific article, but expect strength in argumentation when extraordinary or broad statements are made. Specifically, he used * lots of hand-waving arguments (something along "that is contradictory", even though it is not clear why it should be contradictory) * the evocation of quantum mechanics. Whenever I see someone mention quantum mechanics as an explanation without explaining its association any further, a red flag is raised. Somehow the weirdness of parts of quantum mechanics has lead it to be used as an all-encompassing explanation for all other sorts of phenomena. Homeopathy being a prime example. * the fact that current, "mainstream" research into consciousness has been so easily dismissed without knowing something about it (beyond a youtube video). Some works that I found particularly inspiring (and well-thought) are Thomas Metzinger's work, e.g., Being No One http://www.amazon.com/Being-No-One-Self-Model-Subjectivity/dp/0262633086 http://www.amazon.com/Being-No-One-Self-Model-Subjectivity/d..., for the layman Antonio Damasio's work, Christof Koch, Francisco Varela, just to mention a few.
digisth 13y ago
Getting to this discussion late, but I'd like to add this visualization on different theories of consciousness: http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/play/what-is-consciousness/ http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/play/what-is-conscious...
artagnon 13y ago
For a theory to be good science, it must fit a very large number of observations and not contradict any a single one. Here's my attempt. We must get a tight definition of consciousness to begin with. Are animals conscious as well (and to what degree)? What about amoeba and plants? If you classify "living" things as conscious, and "dead" things as unconscious, what is your definition of "life"? In their work, various people (notably, Metzinger) have isolated certain characteristics that make up various degrees of consciousness. The "conscious experience" is a product of evolution: clearly, "self-aware decision makers" have better chances of survival than "hard-coded automatons". In recent evolution, the part that has changed most significantly is the neocortex. Scientifically speaking, it's very easy to figure out what is responsible for a high degree of consciousness: removing neocortex consistently leads to a lower degree of consciousness => the neocortex is responsible for a large part. Dissect, stick electrodes, and get unbiased data: then do a best fit. Quantum mechanics is quite misunderstood: if you separate out the observer from what is being observed, it looks like humans are operating the universe (because their "observation" causes "collapse", right?). Highly egotistical and inelegant. If you exclude M-theory (because it's not able to make verifiable real-world predictions), a lot of people subscribe to quantum decoherence as an alternative to the classical Copenhagen interpretation. On conscious computer programs. Essentially, I think of consciousness as a higher degree of interaction with its surroundings (it "learns" from its surroundings and adapts more quickly than it would normally take for natural selection to pick a genetic mutation). Aren't we just describing computer programs that interact with humans via a high-level language?

155 points by duncancarroll 13y ago

Consciousness can be modeled, and the brain can be modeled. The models can be correlated, and this is useful to us to get on the same page about what constitutes reality as a picture of "things hanging together in harmony" (compossibility). Consciousness is most important to us as a set of observation statements about us, and it is solely up to us to decide how to interpret those statements. This can be done for other species, and this will tell us whether or not our thought-patterns are actually indicative of right-thinking, thus deserving to be repeated across larger regions of space-time. I recommend a read of http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/369939.Philosophical_Foundations_of_Neuroscience http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/369939.Philosophical_Foun....

EGreg 13y ago

I think David Chalmers would agree with you wholeheartedly: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness Even Patricia Churchland thinks there is a lot here. Philosophers of the mind have dedicated their whole professional careers and lives to thinking about this.

mistercow 13y ago
I think David Chalmers might also notice that this poster is tearing apart a straw man. The "Sophomoric philosophy" quote, for example, was not someone saying "it's sophomoric to think that consciousness is worth thinking about". S/he was saying that the arguments given by the OP were sophomoric. In fact, a tiny minority of the comments in that thread were dismissive of consciousness as an interesting topic of thought. Only one of the comments quoted in this post could reasonably be interpreted as dismissive, but even that one had interesting points to make.

Xcelerate 13y ago

I upvoted the original article not necessarily because I thought it was particularly well-written, but because I looked forward to seeing what the HN comments about the article would say. Nevertheless, I left to go somewhere before I had a chance to peruse them. I think in a conversation about consciousness, it's very important to define exactly what it is you're talking about. I'm not a neuroscientist, but I get the impression that within the field, "consciousness" refers to specific patterns of brain activity. (Some neuroscientist on here can correct me if I'm wrong.) These patterns can be be studied experimentally, simulated computationally, or theorized about mathematically. All fall well into the modern definition of what science encompasses. Testable predictions about reality can be made and understood. Then the author of the first piece uses a different word a little later in the article: > Experience - "why does the feeling which accompanies awareness of sensory information exist at all?" This, in my opinion, is a whole different idea. As a scientist myself (my research is in molecular-dynamics and quantum monte carlo), "experience" is not something that can be assessed at all by the scientific method. Many people argue that "experience" doesn't even exist (see the concept of p-zombies http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie). As for me personally, I'm certain that it does, for if you removed all of my faculties and senses with the exception of leaving my mind intact, I would still experience existence. The curious thing about this is that there's no way for me to tell whether other people (you all) exist in the same way that I do, not even in theory. How do I know if you actually experience existence or are simply a collection of particles following the same rules of physics that everything else does? For then if I was you, I wouldn't be me anymore. One prerequisite for something being scientific is that it must be testable, and this sort of thing is not. So it's not science and I don't waste time conflating it with what actually is science. It's an interesting philosophical question. It's been debated for centuries, and it will continue to be debated for centuries (along the same lines as qualia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualia) but there will never be any kind of resolution to the issue.

TelmoMenezes 13y ago
Neuroscience hasn't been able to produce a single theory on the origin of consciousness, unless one accepts "it emerges from neural activity" as an explanation. Consciousness appears to be the ultimate mystery. There is something very fundamental about it that we don't understand at all. This makes a lot of people uncomfortable, especially the type of people that would like to turn Science into a religion. We just don't know, and it's intellectually dishonest to pretend otherwise.

hjw 13y ago

I personally don't spend a large amount of time thinking about consciousness because I question the practicality. The subject matter is so dense, and like other(s) have stated, philosophers have dedicated their entire lives to pondering the issue. Frankly it sometimes upsets me when I do put an extensive amount of time into it and don't end up coming up with anything conclusive; it is depressing. There is (obviously) a incredible amount of ambiguity surrounding the subject, and there is something about this particular issue that is unnerving. On the other hand if you can stomach the subject matter it is very stimulating, unfortunately it does not lead to concrete conclusions.

kepano 13y ago

> "What discourages me here is that the overall tone of the HN commenters is: Get with the program. Instead of acknowledging that it is an open question and saying something like, “Interesting hypothesis, my own thoughts are that X, Y, Z, but have you read A, B, or C, which indicate Q…”, the response is: (chuckle) Consciousness? We solved that, didn’t you get the memo?" Amen. We need to stop letting the comments devolve into such a miasma and use each story as a jumping off point for intelligent conversation -- why can't we be friends? Continuing on the meta-topic at hand... A flaw that seems to occur in many intelligent people's minds is that as soon as we're able to form an opinion on a particular subject, we assume everyone else has too. Let's take a moment to appreciate that we don't all have state-of-the-art knowledge on every single topic. Our aim should be to help each other move further along, not shoot down attempts to learn.

oblique63 13y ago
> why can't we be friends? Indeed. Here, have an upvote to counteract the downvotes. It looks like this thread is heading to be derailed just as much as the last one unfortunately. HN is cool when it's about concrete subjects like tech/programming/business, but anything more abstract than that is really unnerving to watch unfold around here, and I'm sure we both wish it wasn't so. Honestly, the only reason I even comment on HN is to try and invoke these sorts of underrepresented viewpoints into conversation, but it's quite overwhelming to even try sometimes.

Gravityloss 13y ago

Everybody keeps getting the Schrödinger's cat experiment 100% backwards. It was created by Schrödinger to highlight how absurd the interpretation of quantum mechanics was at that time. Since then, even the Copenhagen interpretation basically says that the "observation" happens already at the Geiger counter: "Analysis of an actual experiment found that measurement alone (for example by a Geiger counter) is sufficient to collapse a quantum wave function before there is any conscious observation of the measurement" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schr%C3%B6dinger%27s_cat#Copenhagen_interpretation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schr%C3%B6dinger%27s_cat#Copenh... Consciousness might be worth thinking about. If it exists independently of the brain, it still must have effects on the brain, to have effects on human actions. These effects on the brain could be measurable. "This voltage here went up for an unknown reason". Further, it pushes the question to another unobservable "magical" world. So, the consciousness exists in another world which is not directly measurable. Can we measure it indirectly? What is the structure of consciousness in the astral plane or however you are going to call it? If the whole goal of arguing that the consciousness exists in the astral plane is that "we can't study it", then that sounds a bit non-serious.

mcguire 13y ago
I once had a friend who described a RPG scenario in a world in which "science doesn't work". My response was, "Wait, science is, by definition, figuring out, by whatever means, what works and what does not, whatever that means." Postulating that science doesn't work, or that "we can't study it", is going to result in a radically odd universe.
deleted 13y ago
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Dylan16807 13y ago
The cat experiment is a simplification. It doesn't matter that it was created to show the absurdity. People are not getting it wrong. All you need to know at the end is that the bigger / more energy a system has, the less time it can stay superimposed before collapsing by itself into one state. For anything macro-scale this timeline is basically zero.

mistercow 13y ago

So my comment got quoted. Neat. I'd like to respond to: > My response: who said anything about metaphysical? Well, the original author did. The entire article is, at its core, an argument for dualism. Dualism is a metaphysical theory. As for the accusation that I intended to imply that consciousness was a solved problem, all I can say is "What?" Seriously, how did you get that from what I said? The problem with the article, and the reason that people responded negatively (although, I think, for the most part thoughtfully), is not that everybody thinks the problem of consciousness is easy, or that it has been solved. It's that the arguments presented were weak and not particularly interesting or novel. I agree that discussion on HN should be thoughtful and polite. But I don't think that means we should be constantly patting each other on the back and blowing up each other's egos. I also don't really think the quote mining here was helpful. Here's the comment that was quoted simply as "Not a useful concept": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6195854 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6195854 Huh, it actually looks like that comment went on to bring up the concept of zombies, and linked to further reading. I guess quoting that part of the comment wouldn't have supported your indignant outrage though. Finally, the position that consciousness is not a useful concept is an important part of this discussion. How can we even have a meaningful conversation about consciousness without first addressing whether what we're talking about is real?

oblique63 13y ago

> I respectfully submit that this attitude should be considered harmful, for several reasons, not the least of which is that it stifles intellectual curiosity into a subject that is still an open book Indeed. It is quite discerning to see smart people fighting against what they believe to be anti-intellectualism with a fair share of anti-intellectualism of their own. I believe it might have more to do with a lack of exposure to varied subjects rather than a definite lack of intellectual curiosity in general however. Because many hackers are quite intellectually curious in their own domain, yet can still be susceptible to being as cynical and myopic as religious fundamentalists in other areas for some reason. The quality of thinking critically doesn't always seem to transcend domains, so I'm guessing it's a side-effect of living in a filtered environment beyond some developmental milestone of a person's curiosity. The string of comments in this other recent thread showcases this type of odd adherence to lack of understanding quite nicely: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6194276 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6194276 It really is odd how when philosophy is explicitly brought up, it is generally labeled as a useless endeavor, yet in most other discussions you see philosophical questions being raised all the time with the intention of using them as 'appeals to ambiguousness', when (as you mentioned) most of these questions have already been asked and thoroughly answered by philosophers ages ago. Not that there's anything wrong in not knowing about this, but clearly there's an interest to know these types of answers that arises organically, which makes the dismissal of philosophy an ultimately misguided exercise in cognitive dissonance. Throw in all the (literally ancient) logical fallacies you see being thrown around amongst smart, well-educated people, and it just makes the whole situation even more confusing. While I admittedly haven't read deeply enough into the psychology behind the Meyer-Briggs personality types, they do define and elaborate on types of people that could logically lead to these kinds of odd views. The easiest example is of the classic INTP vs INTJ types, both of which are strikingly similar, yet supposedly differ in one general crucial area. INTP's take all the input they can about the world and evolve their framework of understanding around it, while INTJ's supposedly form their elaborate framework of understanding first, then explore their inputs that correspond to it. I'm only somewhat partial to this explanation because I line up as a perfect INTP on all counts, but it honestly might as well be astrology at this point for all I know. Still a fun thought experiment though. EDIT: I realize that most on HN like speaking in more concrete terms, such as about the neurological basis for the notions of 'consciousness' and all that, however abstract argumentation and analysis does have use when talking about the act of argumentation itself. So I hope those who downvoted me at least provide an explanation within that context, because I am admittedly curious about what other perspectives there are on this matter.

dglittle 13y ago

it's so exciting to me that this community has some interest in consciousness. my background is 'hacker', but looking forward, I think consciousness is highly relevant (soon, we really will be able to hack our own brains, and when that happens, I think we'll care a lot about consciousness theory). anyway, I've written some blog posts with some thoughts on this topic that I'll throw into the mix: http://realgl.blogspot.com/2012/12/consciousness.html http://realgl.blogspot.com/2012/12/consciousness.html http://realgl.blogspot.com/2012/06/dimension-of-interpretation.html http://realgl.blogspot.com/2012/06/dimension-of-interpretati... (note that these posts were written maybe six months ago)

tocomment 13y ago
Interesting reading. I like your writing style it's very clear and easy to understand even though these are complex concepts.

gems 13y ago

I tend to be dismissive of the philosophical conversation. I think what will resolve the question is scientific (biological) study. Maybe math/cs theorists (AI) will get there first. But I am almost certain that no philosophical conversation we can have will give me an insight about our cognition.

vonsydov 13y ago

What's most interesting to me is how every few years (and every few decades sometime back) we're able to rationalize away certain kinds of subjective phenomena. Will we eventually reach a point where we completely STOP considering pure awareness as a problem...don't know...I guess nobody knows. But this kind of thing happens every so often where a large amount of people stop taking something seriously. At this point e.g. existence of an anthropomorphic god.

test-it 13y ago

OK, what's your definition of consciousness? Most animals, even single celled, need to have some way to handle the separation between "me" and "the rest of the world". I look at say my cat - it definitely has this concept somewhere in its brain circuitry. What human has is just more neurons.

tatumizer 13y ago
If single-cell organism is conscious, and each cell of our body is a "single cell", it immediately follows from here that "our" consciousness is in fact consciousness of a certain, very specialized, cell which resides somewhere in our body. Maybe it lives in the brain, maybe elsewhere, but it's a single cell nonetheless.
- jongraehl 13y ago
  It doesn't follow - the type of consciousness we experience could be different. Though if you were saying that it's absurd to call single cell 'conscious' in the sense that human brains are, then I agree.
  - tatumizer 13y ago
    I really think every cell is conscious, and whatever we believe to be "our" consciousness comes from a single cell. I am not alone in this opinion: http://www.ucl.ac.uk/~regfjxe/awnew.htm http://www.ucl.ac.uk/~regfjxe/awnew.htm (though I came up with this trivial idea independently, and later found the article by googling) This ME-cell gets inputs from other cells obvioously.
    - Dylan16807 13y ago
      What happens when that cell dies? Lots of neurons die, it must happen all the time.
      - tatumizer 13y ago

negamax 13y ago

I think it's worth adding to this thread that Buddha in his teachings said, eye has eye consiousness, ear, tongue, mind.. has their consiousness. He described consiousness as one of the five aggregates of human state. I never could wrap my head around the concept that awakening means also to see consciousness as empty.

Attilaa 13y ago
Beautiful. Thanks for linking in Buddha's teachings.

pknight 13y ago

I don't know why people don't think about this topic more, especially if you are curious person. A very interesting line of research that could have profound implications on science and our understanding of consciousness is being done by Radin et al. Specifically he's looking deeper at the possible role of consciousness and the collapsing of the wave in quantum theory with some really interesting repeatable experiments. He's taken the classic double slit experiment and has been testing to see whether conscious observers can affect the results merely by focusing their attention. So far the results are positive. Here's one paper: http://www.deanradin.com/papers/Physics%20Essays%20Radin%20final.pdf http://www.deanradin.com/papers/Physics%20Essays%20Radin%20f...

anigbrowl 13y ago

Personally I lean towards the idea of consciousness as an emergent phenomenon, ie closer to Hofstadter than Searle (for anyone who has wondered exactly what Godel, Escher, Bach is about, it's essentially a long argument for strong AI). However, I'm not sure about this; the main reason I can't subscribe to Searle's point of view is that he's trying to prove a negative, and I'd rather not know the answer than handwave one. I thought Carson's article was a bit fluffy and lacking focus, but then it was meant to provoke discussion and debate rather than offer a final answer. By far the most intriguing counter-proposal to the conventional wisdom is the late Julian Jaynes' The origin of consciousness in the breakdown of the bicameral mind which is such a monumentally good book that it's worth reading even if it is entirely wrong.

dylangs1030 13y ago
I never came across The Origin of Consciousness - what makes it "monumentally good" in your opinion?
- anigbrowl 13y ago
  Oh dear, I can't easily sum it up in a couple of sentences. It's just a completely different way of thinking about how the mind works, the construction of personal identity, and the interaction between the individual and the rest of the world as to induce an acute sense of vertigo if you've grown up taking the Cartesian model for granted. There's a summary at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Origin_of_Consciousness_in_the_Breakdown_of_the_Bicameral_Mind http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Origin_of_Consciousness_in_... but relying on the summary is like me telling you that Beethoven's 5th symphony is in C minor, opens with a distinctive motif, and is generally quite dramatic sounding...all true, but absolutely nothing like the experience of actually listening to it. The book provided me with a completely different model for examination of the world, which is pretty unusual. While I don't feel wholly committed to Jaynes' model, I've found it enormously useful, in the same way as Understanding Media.

rasengan0 13y ago

For argument's sake: http://youtu.be/JTN9Nx8VYtk http://youtu.be/JTN9Nx8VYtk take on multiple perspectives and we can enjoy some fruits of the discussion

bhitov 13y ago

This article is attacking a strawman. The original article was dismissed not for merely discussing consciousness but for doing it nonsensically.

incompatible 13y ago

My opinion is that consciousness is an aspect of self-aware thought, and arises from the physical operation of the brain. There's no reason to think that a computer couldn't be conscious, given the right programming, and perhaps far more conscious than a human, since it could be aware of every aspect of its own operation. Since consciousness is an aspect of thought, it ceases to exist when thought stops, such as when you go to sleep or when you die. A new consciousness will be created if you wake up. A corollary is that I don't think science fiction ideas such as teleportation or mind transfer into a machine give any philosophical problems. A new consciousness is created when the newly created body/software starts to think, the same way that it's created when you wake up in the morning.

jdietrich 13y ago

If you believe in the existence of consciousness, what would prove to you that your qualitative experience is fundamentally no different to the state of a Turing machine? What would persuade you that what is called "consciousness" is of no special interest? OP states that "[consciousness is] a situation where a root cause is murky and escapes testability", which is simply special pleading. If you cannot test your hypothesis, what is more likely - that you have discovered a completely unique and mysterious phenomenon, or that your hypothesis is inadequate? It appears to me that the whole argument is predisposed upon that sort of special pleading. We have no clear evidence for the existence of consciousness, but it must exist because my subjective perception tells me it does. That perception different from the subjective perception of god or auras or the buddha-nature because... it just is. Bluntly, go away and come back when you have a null hypothesis.

benched 13y ago
Do you yourself experience subjective awareness? Why? And what does that subjective awareness have to do with a Turing machine?
Tloewald 13y ago
> but it must exist because my subjective perception tells me it does. What is there besides one's own subjective perception? Hello! This is a figment of your imagination calling.
RivieraKid 13y ago
Some people get so used to the idea that science explains everything, that they became completely blind to opposing views. It's hardwired deeply into their brains. That's how I explain to myself this kind of blindness I witness in every discussion about consciousness. Why do I feel pain when the atoms in my brain are in a specific configuration? Current state-of-the-art physical models can't possibly explain that. And it's even impossible to describe what feeling of pain is in physical terms. (No, I don't mean neural activity during pain, I mean the feeling of pain.) Every physical theory is based solely on consciouss experience. Everything we know about the world is through consciousness.

lnanek2 13y ago

Russians have kept dog heads alive and reacting with nothing attached by medical support machines. French have chopped off heads and had the person react to voice commands. Plenty of people have broken their neck and still been mentally there. Claiming consciousness does not come from the brain is just silly nonsense from before we had modern biology. Early philosophers thought the brain was for cooling blood. Even if you want to make up quantum superposition nonsense or whatever other big words you can find the place it is occurring is still inarguably the brain. It's OK to go talk about useless, meaningless, non-diagnostic bullshit after that. But you should realize you are just being religious and not talking about anything worthwhile that then has meaning toward physical structures. You should no longer talk about the brain after that because you are just throwing in physical terms to try to get people who would otherwise dismiss you to pay attention.

bglusman 13y ago

On my mobile so haven't had time to read all the comments or finish original article, but I agree, consciousness is worth thinking about, and trying to understand scientifically/rigorously. Many people are doing so but in particular in my research this one known as Integrated Information Theory[1] is a strong candidate, or precursor to such a candidate, and I'd encourage anyone intereated in the question or in advancing discussion of this proposed language and theory to do so[2]. Maybe I'm using the citation brackets wrong there though, apologies, I'm on a bus and it's dark and I'm tired :-) [1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_information_theory http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_information_theory [2]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6197184 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6197184

benched 13y ago

You cannot reduce or hand-wave consciousness away by calling it illusory, or by reducing it to neural activity. You can try, but you'll just be stringing words together to make nonsense. Every one of us experiences consciousness - subjectivity, qualitative awareness, 'what it is like to be a me' - directly. We gain one type of knowledge about consciousness by studying and poking the brain, and by observing people with abnormal brains. But that can only take us part of the way. We gain another kind of knowledge about consciousness by making subjectivity into an object. We can do that via means such as meditation, LSD, DMT, mushrooms, marijuana, some types of physical exertion, and perhaps more esoteric means like astral travel, or involuntarily by near-death experiences. These give insights by allowing us to become aware of awareness, to perturb, or to side-step normal consciousness.

runeks 13y ago

I suspect that we cannot define what consciousness is because we are consciousness. Only an observer outside a system can say what that system is. An entity cannot observe itself. The expression "experiencing consciousness" makes as little sense as "seeing vision" or "tasting flavor". Experiencing is consciousness, seeing is vision and tasting is flavor.

Attilaa 13y ago
Thank You. I'm glad someone said this. Edit: Alan Watts talks in depth about these matters. Although these explanations are not scientific or falsifiable -- it's an interesting attempt at understanding our own views of consciousness. Just because the feelings of love are not falsifiable, does not mean that it does not weave a great story that one tells themselves to keep sane.

calhoun137 13y ago

Since we are doing another meta-discussion on how supposedly nasty the comment section is sometimes, I'd like to say I don't have a problem with the tone of the comments at all, and I for one would be really sad if people started pulling their punches. The extremely high degree of criticism found in the comments is actually something I value very highly about this community. One of the things I love about the comment section is that people treat each other like adults who are capable of handling criticism. This isn't the office, this is HN. Not being able to handle criticism is a debilitating personality trait for someone who wants to achieve a high level of success in any sort of intellectual pursuit; and that is the reason why I strongly disagree with the desire on the part of some to change this aspect of the community.

wpietri 13y ago
Criticism and nastiness are orthogonal. Indeed, I think effective criticism is bound up with kindness. I know the times I've been an ass while criticizing somebody aren't about fixing the problem; they're about me looking smart at somebody else's expense. At best, I'm making them work past my obnoxiousness to get to the hopefully valuable bits. At worst, they discard the criticism as pure meanness. On the other hand, if I'm really delivering criticism because I'd like someone to get better, then it usually works best when I make it easy to see that I'm on their side.
RivieraKid 13y ago
I think what you're saying is quite stupid. I often find HN discussions... not sure how to describe it... I guess I just don't like many of the commenters for some unconscious reason. It could be: passive-agressiveness, people who are not emotionally mature (pg), overall negativity, stupid people who try to sound smart. Or something else. The atmosphere on other online communities is more positive, which is a good thing. You can disagree without being negative. I also noticed that for some strange unconsciouss reason, I really dislike people who use cliché phrases like: "Just to play devil's advocate." or "X and Y are orthogonal". (This comment is intentionally quite negative because you sound like an adult capable of taking criticism.)
- 13y ago

mcguire 13y ago

For anyone interested in quantum mechanics and consciousness, I recommend Scott Aaronson's book Quantum Computing Since Democritus; the chapters on Penrose are worth the price of admission. His blog, Shtetl-Optimized[1], is also a good read (and I think the book appeared there first). On a different subject, recently there were a spasm of interest in fMRI studies that showed that "free" choices could be predicted based on neural activity well before a "conscious choice" was made.[2][3][4] The general consensus seemed to be "Hah! Take that, free will!" My take on the results were that they were hardly a surprise, if consciousness is an activity of the brain. You should no more expect to make a conscious decision prior to displaying brain activity relating to the decision than you should expect to perceive a flash of light before the light bulb is lit. It would not necessarily have any negative implications for the existence of free will; those experiments are simply exploring the mechanism of free will. On the other hand, I believe they do kind of imply that consciousness is a product of the jello in your noggin. Either that or there are some funky delays involved. Now, as for the third buttock: if consciousness doesn’t come from the brain, how does it work, exactly? I'd like some mechanism with my philosophy, thanks. Presumably, if I'm waving my arms around, you can trace the motor neuron activity from my appendages, up my spinal cord, and into my brain. But "and then a miracle occurs" is a pretty uninteresting way to connect that with the universe deciding that jazz hands are necessary. [1] http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/ http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/ [2] http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2008/04/mind_decision http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2008/04/mind_d... [3] http://www.nature.com/news/2011/110831/full/477023a.html http://www.nature.com/news/2011/110831/full/477023a.html [4] http://scienceblogs.com/cognitivedaily/2009/09/03/free-choice-may-not-be-as-free/ http://scienceblogs.com/cognitivedaily/2009/09/03/free-choic...

aufreak3 13y ago

I didn't come across the HN post when the original article was posted. I think the original article has many warning signs of "sophomoric" thinking to warrant rapid dismissal. The first big bold warning sign is this - "After reading and listening to David Chalmers, I came to realize that there is an intelligent argument that supports the idea that consciousness does not emerge from the brain. <big-n-bold>Quantum Mechanics</big-n-bold>" Invoking the "magic" and "mysterious" quantum mechanics to understand and explain something that isn't even defined in the article is, indeed, "sophomoric philosophy". In the original article, you'll also find this regarding the Schrodinger's cat "paradox" - "Many physicists today think the many-worlds theory resolves this paradox by stating that there are actually infinitely many universes, some in which you are dead and some in which you are living, and that once the quantum trigger is measured/observed, a specific universe is followed." Plain wrong. The "many worlds" is not a "theory", but an interpretation of quantum mechanics. It does not add any new physical mechanisms over and above what we already have in quantum mechanics - i.e. there is no "once a quantum trigger is measured/observed" in the many worlds interpretation. All these universes exist. Period. The problem of "observation" in quantum mechanics is being discussed here without even a mention of "decoherence". AFAIK, the unexplained part of quantum mechanics to date is the Born probabilities - i.e. why does the likelihood of observing an event correspond to the magnitude square of the amplitude we calculate for it. There are some recent insights into this, but I believe this is still unexplained. The original thing that the article sought to explore is whether it is possible that consciousness does not come from the brain. If that is indeed the primary point to be explored in this essay, the question to be asked is what does "come from the brain" mean? When a current passes through a memory circuit, it toggles from 0 to 1. What does it mean to say this "comes from the circuit"? Does is not also "come from the current"? We thus reach a point where all we can say is "shut up and compute", for we've fallen into the trappings of everyday language. edit: typos.

bittired 13y ago

Great post. I personally think that people that reply indicating that anyone who doesn't believe in the traditional sciences, not including Philosophy but rather using our "accepted body of Physiological and Psychiatric knowledge" as truth, are one step away from Asperger's. I do not mean that in a derogatory sense, since many with Asperger's are highly functioning, but their tendency to clinch onto mathematics and incomplete (but widely accepted) science and use it as the answer for everything is childish. I believe that our universe (the entirety, beyond what we experience) is not completely "rational", but some just cannot accept that. We would not be where we are today without Philosophers like Plato, Socrates, and Aristotle. However, if a conservative talk show host came along saying the same thing as these philosophers, they would attempt to beat him/her down for being an idiot. There is much to be learned by thinking outside of the box and trying to understand others' points of view. I'm a conservative-leaning moderate and independent (U.S.). I actually listen to both sides of the story (or more if possible), and then make up my mind which works with my existing belief system and where I can improve, knowing that both of them are biased and probably neither are completely right or wrong. I'm not better than anyone else, but I get frustrated, as it is farcical how one-sided conversations here can be, and how little people give and come to terms with each other.

bittired 13y ago
Not sure why I'm surprised I got -1'd, but I'm guessing it is because someone wanted to prove my point?
- verbin217 13y ago
  Well making sweeping generalizations about groups of people is usually seen as offensive. Then again, I say that as a person diagnosed with aspergers so my opinion of what is and isn't offensive is obviously suspect ;). I didn't downmod you though and i wouldn't have even if i had the karma. Negative stereotypes regarding aspergers are too prevalent to really blame on individuals at this point. I agree with you about the world not necessarily being entirely rational. I see rationality as a subjective position from which to perceive reality. Another is the self and its intrinsic interests. This is where I seem to fail in my communication with others. This may be a wildly arrogant assertion but I think most people are insanely self obsessed. From this I can understand why empathy is seen as being absolutely necessary. Frankly, I think most people with autism spectrum disorders actually lack the self obsession that would normally be redirected onto others via empathy. This causes a failure to appropriately acknowledge others and with tragic irony a typical individual will ascribe their behavior to self-obsession. Anyway, you mention the learning acquired from considering others points of view. The thought process I've found most rewarding in this regard is to first build up the person's opinion as much as I can and then to attack any weaknesses. The attack is intended to elicit a defense which I cannot conceive. The ultimate aim being to fully understand their position and its legitimacy. Needless to say, this often becomes unpleasant. Likely stemming from my pathological lack of tact :(. The important thing to note is that there are people (at least one person) who are detail oriented. If you want them to "give and come to terms with each other" then you're going to have to endure some ostensible pettifogging. All that being said, there's some straight up nastiness here on HN and much of it is exactly the condescending appeal to immature sciences that you describe. Oh also, just a note: it's likely that Socrates had aspergers or something similar.

shuaib 13y ago

If all my memories are copied over to a humanoid robot, and that robot claims to be me, given access to all my memories. Is he really me? What if the actual me is standing right next to it? Are there now two me? Or is the robot just faking it? But if it's the latter, how do we know I am not faking someone else's consciousness (i.e. not the robot, but I is the one faking)?

dschiptsov 13y ago

Some very bright people, notably Chomsky, Minsky and Kurzweil are advocating utilitarian, "mechanical" nature of the mind, which is much more useful than any religious/mysterious crap. Very crudely, language is just neural network training (due to repeated exposure) and pattern matching on what what was trained. This oversimplified model nevertheless could explain the whole phenomena very well. We do not memorizing grammars, for example, but we are able to distinguish well-formed sentence form nonsense just because it doesn't match the common structure we were trained. People who started to study their second language as adult would tell you that sentences are not deliberately "constructed" according to the memorized rules as it is when we begin to getting familiar with a new language, but "emerge by itself" after some training. So we have no grammars inside our brain, but a mechanism to train to build up one. The consciousness, according to the same views, is nothing but a "current working buffer" for ongoing processes, and as some "activity" exceeds some threshold it acquires a "focus" , as if we are "switching" to it. Minsky have stated many times, that it will require years until people will start using such vocabulary from the world of complex systems in attempts to describe what's going instead of Froidian or common-sense memes. There is a course based on his Society of Mind book on MIT Open Courseware - very nice talks to listen.

sveme 13y ago

I agree to some extent with your assessment, however, I also had some issues with the original post and could understand the anger of people that delved (much) deeper into the subject. I am not expecting a blog post to be a well-thought and rigorous scientific article, but expect strength in argumentation when extraordinary or broad statements are made. Specifically, he used * lots of hand-waving arguments (something along "that is contradictory", even though it is not clear why it should be contradictory) * the evocation of quantum mechanics. Whenever I see someone mention quantum mechanics as an explanation without explaining its association any further, a red flag is raised. Somehow the weirdness of parts of quantum mechanics has lead it to be used as an all-encompassing explanation for all other sorts of phenomena. Homeopathy being a prime example. * the fact that current, "mainstream" research into consciousness has been so easily dismissed without knowing something about it (beyond a youtube video). Some works that I found particularly inspiring (and well-thought) are Thomas Metzinger's work, e.g., Being No One http://www.amazon.com/Being-No-One-Self-Model-Subjectivity/dp/0262633086 http://www.amazon.com/Being-No-One-Self-Model-Subjectivity/d..., for the layman Antonio Damasio's work, Christof Koch, Francisco Varela, just to mention a few.

digisth 13y ago

Getting to this discussion late, but I'd like to add this visualization on different theories of consciousness: http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/play/what-is-consciousness/ http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/play/what-is-conscious...

artagnon 13y ago

For a theory to be good science, it must fit a very large number of observations and not contradict any a single one. Here's my attempt. We must get a tight definition of consciousness to begin with. Are animals conscious as well (and to what degree)? What about amoeba and plants? If you classify "living" things as conscious, and "dead" things as unconscious, what is your definition of "life"? In their work, various people (notably, Metzinger) have isolated certain characteristics that make up various degrees of consciousness. The "conscious experience" is a product of evolution: clearly, "self-aware decision makers" have better chances of survival than "hard-coded automatons". In recent evolution, the part that has changed most significantly is the neocortex. Scientifically speaking, it's very easy to figure out what is responsible for a high degree of consciousness: removing neocortex consistently leads to a lower degree of consciousness => the neocortex is responsible for a large part. Dissect, stick electrodes, and get unbiased data: then do a best fit. Quantum mechanics is quite misunderstood: if you separate out the observer from what is being observed, it looks like humans are operating the universe (because their "observation" causes "collapse", right?). Highly egotistical and inelegant. If you exclude M-theory (because it's not able to make verifiable real-world predictions), a lot of people subscribe to quantum decoherence as an alternative to the classical Copenhagen interpretation. On conscious computer programs. Essentially, I think of consciousness as a higher degree of interaction with its surroundings (it "learns" from its surroundings and adapts more quickly than it would normally take for natural selection to pick a genetic mutation). Aren't we just describing computer programs that interact with humans via a high-level language?