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Why can’t the world’s greatest minds solve the mystery of consciousness?

51 points by room271 12y ago

gus_massa 12y ago
> Philosophers and scientists have been at war for decades over the question of what makes human beings more than complex robots [Citation needed] It's the same problem that AI has. AI is whatever a computer can't do. A few decades ago the computer couldn't play chess, so chess was a good example of AI. Once the computers could play chess and easily wind a match against a grand master, the we can see behind the curtain and understand the tricks, and now chess is only a circus trick and no real AI. For now, computers can't simulate consciousness, so it's a mystery and a good AI research topic.
- snikeris 12y ago
  How would you know if something is "simulating consciousness"?
  - Animats 12y ago
    Exactly. "Philosophy is the discipline in which you kick up a lot of dust and then complain you can't see" - attributed to Leibniz. People were fussing over this issue long before the 1994 paper mentioned. Aristotle fussed over it; he was trying to pontificate on what makes humans different from animals. He decided it was the ability to do arithmetic. We now know that arithmetic is, in an absolute sense, one of the easiest things to build out of logic elements. The big practical problem in AI is not "consciousness", but "common sense", the ability to predict what's probably going to happen from an act and deciding whether or not to do it. After we solve that problem and are able to build robots that can get through a day of diverse tasks without help, we can look at consciousness again. As a practical matter, it's useful to view "consciousness" as a background task with the job of adjusting the parameters used to formulate sequences of actions. Humans can't figure out how consciousness works by introspection because brains don't have enough internal access to their own processing. Other methods will be necessary, and we don't have the analysis tools yet.
- protonfish 12y ago
  Or can they? I suppose we'd need a quality definition of consciousness first - one that is specific, unambiguous, and able to be tested. It seems everyone has skipped over that part to prematurely claim that whatever pops into their head is a legitimate theory. It's not surprising consciousness research is such a mess - it is a topic that is too close to how people define themselves. If somebody had a nice, simple, practical, hypothesis it would probably be attacked and buried. Civilization had a hard time adjusting to the sun being the center of the solar system, and many still haven't come to terms with the fact that we evolved from common ancestors of other living things. I doubt many people want to hear that our thoughts, our feelings and experiences can be simply modeled on a computer. Or worse, that filthy animals are conscious too. The reason the problem is "hard" is not scientific, it is emotional.
  - RivieraKid 12y ago
    > If somebody had a nice, simple, practical, hypothesis it would probably be attacked and buried. The problem is that consciousness is a metaphysical concept, you can't scrutinize it with the scientific method, it requires a complete change of perspective to understand consciousness.
- drzaiusapelord 12y ago
  >AI is whatever a computer can't do. Not sure if I agree with this. My computer can't do a lot of things and only a small set of that would really be considered AI. The chess example isn't great. We have known chess is a deterministic game and a good enough algorithm on powerful enough hardware should beat or stalemate a grandmaster. The state space is big but finite. Its just a more complex form of checkers. This seemed to be more of a research issue of a known solvable problem that needs its state space shrunk to something we can calculate than a true AI breakthrough. I think AI like described in this article is a functioning, self-determined, self-learning, HAL-like system. This doesn't exist. It probably can with the right research and funding. Its not a problem of perception or arguing about what may or may not be AI. Although the AI-effect can be annoying. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect I don't see the AI effect explaining why AI hasn't gotten farther. I think not understanding consciousness or the brain on a certain level is probably our biggest hurdle. Unlike chess, we don't know what we're trying to solve exactly.
- contingencies 12y ago
  I believe the quote is... AI is whatever hasn't been done yet. - Douglas Hofstadter (1980) ... taken from my fortune clone @ https://github.com/globalcitizen/taoup https://github.com/globalcitizen/taoup
- kyberias 12y ago
  I'm a layman but I don't think that's fair. When I think about "good AI", that we haven't achieved yet, I think about Data from Star Trek. I'm pretty sure we'll know when we've reached that level of AI. We're not there yet.
  - patmcc 12y ago
    If we had that, I suspect lots of people would say "ah, well, that's just a clever bit of programming - it's not really thinking/feeling/alive/conscious/whatever, so I'd hardly call that good AI". Also I'd bet the body helps - if you had a 'cloud' (not android) version of Data, people would be even harder to convince.
    - bduerst 12y ago
      I've had those same discussions. The entertainment industry has set a pretty strange standard for A.I. with the general public. What A.I. will eventually become will probably be wildly different than a limited personification like Data in Star Trek. The first automobiles looked like horse-drawn carriages, so maybe it's not right to fault people for expecting A.I. to look like humans.
  - andrew_gardener 12y ago
    What's they're trying to say is that the goal for what AI is supposed to be/achieve is always raising as when we actually reach the goal. The general the goal of AI is to do things only Humans can do (in the past this included chess or holding a semi-coherent conversation). Now its more focused on human consciousness like Data from Star Trek so their statement is fair enough.
applecore 12y ago
What exactly is the “mystery” of consciousness? This article is a long read, but it doesn't really formulate the question.
- snikeris 12y ago
  From the article: It was a puzzle so bewildering that, in the months after his talk, people started dignifying it with capital letters – the Hard Problem of Consciousness – and it’s this: why on earth should all those complicated brain processes feel like anything from the inside? Why aren’t we just brilliant robots, capable of retaining information, of responding to noises and smells and hot saucepans, but dark inside, lacking an inner life? And how does the brain manage it? How could the 1.4kg lump of moist, pinkish-beige tissue inside your skull give rise to something as mysterious as the experience of being that pinkish-beige lump, and the body to which it is attached?
  - thirdtruck 12y ago
    Thank you for bringing in the snippet. To analyse its contents, I'll ask this: what's to say that a computer doesn't experience some very primitive form of consciousness? If we unplugged everything except the power cord, but left a complicated simulation running, it would still have something like "a rich inner life." Its peripherals and sensors give it a sense of a body and, with abstract drivers, a degree of conceptual separation from said hardware. Doubly so in the case of virtual machines. After all, we can't "truly" experience the same thing that a computer might from the inside, so who are we to doubt "computer consciousness?" If the proponents of "The Hard Problem of Consciousness" can't give a quantified explanation of how to distinguish a theoretical computer consciousness from a human one, that raises the question of whether the problem actually exists. For my part, I don't believe in consciousness as a concrete thing, only a label we use to group together quite a few disparate systems and phenomenon. It's the same way that I don't believe in "Ruby" as a concrete thing, but only in the unit tests, the sample code, the docs, and the thoughts in Matz's head that we subconsciously conflate.
  - rbrogan 12y ago
    Is there anything for which you cannot ask a similar question of the form: Why does xyz exist? Why are things not just [this simpler thing]? For those types of questions, I imagine one would answer: because if it were not so then things would be nonsense. If this question is asked of consciousness without saying what consciousness is doing such that if you took it away then you would have nonsense, then I do not see how anyone can answer it. The way the question is framed up, consciousness accomplishes nothing as far as survival goes. "evolution could have produced zombies instead of conscious creatures – and it didn’t" Zombie seems to be defined as: phenomena that you think has consciousness but does not. If consciousness has been defined as some phenomena where you have an intuitive understanding of what is being communicated by that word "consciousness" but also it (consciousness) does not do anything, then how can anyone explain why consciousness should be? Anything you can think of as a function of consciousness, can then be hand-waved as able to be accomplished by zombies.
jimrandomh 12y ago
The Hard Problem of Consciousness(tm) can't be answered because it isn't a question at all; it's just a confusion. People who like to worship mystery are attracted to it, because it sucks to have your sacred mystery pulled out from under you by an explanation.
- rosser 12y ago
  Then explain how it is that meat can feel. There is absolutely nothing inherent in the nature of meat, as far as we can quantify, that entails feeling. So, please, yank my sacred mystery out from beneath me: what's the explanation?
  - devindotcom 12y ago
    first, since you seem so eager, what is inherent? what is meat? what is feeling?
  - sliverstorm 12y ago
    I wonder sometimes if we grant undue weight to "feeling" and "consciousness". A plant reacts to external stimuli in easy-to-understand ways. Sure, we are more complicated than that, but why are phototropisms just a curiosity while "feeling" is special? What if "feeling" and "consciousness" is nothing special at all, just extremely intricate and sophisticated clockwork that, like any sufficiently advanced technology, appears to be magic?
  - tjradcliffe 12y ago
    > There is absolutely nothing inherent in the nature of meat... This is like declaring there is absolutely nothing inherent in the nature of matter to have temperature. Anyone making such a declaration would be looked at strangely if they wanted to enter a discussion on the nature of temperature. Declaring from the outset that there is anything particularly weird about biological systems being conscious, when one of the most basic, widely-accepted facts about biological systems is that they can be conscious, is not a good move. It sets up the problem as a Big Mystery, which is what the OP is pointing out. There are some "problems" that many people are never going to accept the solution to. Every few years someone publishes "the definitive answer" on the Mona Lisa's smile, and I still see people asking, "does nature or nurture cause behaviour?" as if it was a serious or interesting question. Likewise, there is a very significant chunk of the population dedicated to the proposition that "consciousness is fundamentally mysterious", and one day when we have it worked out pretty well why some complex systems have this emergent property, those people will still be ending articles on the subject with coy gibberish about how "...in the end, you can't reduce the magic of conscious experience to an equation." Sure you can. And we will, in the same way we came to understand temperature as an emergent property of systems of interacting particles in closed systems, without recourse of phlogiston or caloric or any other thermodynamic secret sauce.
orthecreedence 12y ago
Perhaps the answer to the question of "what is consciousness" can't be reached by thinking. Maybe there's not a logical answer in the same way we find reasons to explain the world around us. That would explain why the greatest minds can't solve the mystery. Either that, or our species is just not evolved enough to comprehend the problem.
dominotw 12y ago
i can't take anyone who uses the word "consciousness" seriously, given noone has any idea what it actually means.
- snikeris 12y ago
  Is your own experience not enough? It is a phenomenon that you are experiencing right now.
Marazan 12y ago
Predicated on the concept that the Hard Problem of Consciousness is actually a problem.
kendallpark 12y ago
Mind-body dualism is the bane of my existence. My thoughts on this article: 1. The fact that we cannot scientifically determine how something functions does not necessary imply a non-physical cause. 2. Thought experiments are inherently limited to human conceptualizations which--while based in reality--have no authority over reality. Here's a famous thought experiment: Descartes believed that clear and distinct perceptions can be certain. I can think about a horse and a dog separately, so they most be different things, right? Well, I can also think about time and space as distinct entities but guess what they're not. Thought experiments are entirely limited by human intuition and human intuition is not guaranteed to properly reflect reality. The fact that you can imagine a zombie of yourself has no bearing on reality. I can imagine traveling faster than the speed of light but that doesn't make it possible. 3. When systems reach sufficient enough complexity it is impossible to understand them by merely analyzing the individual components and understanding the rules that govern them. Even if I had full knowledge of the human brain and how it worked, there would be no way for me to understand another person's first person perspective because there would be no way for me to simulate his brain. Mary's Room, qualia, and Mooreland's argument from first person perspective are all dependent upon the assumption that if you can understand the components of such a system, you ought be able to understand the whole. This premise is false. 4. There are plenty of "nonphysical" entities that we presume to have an entirely physical basis. Take the operating system on your computer. Is your OS a physical object? A physical property? It's real. You can interact with it. But if you pry about your hard drive you will not find a little desktop with folders and icons. Even if you could read the one's and zero's off the magnetic disk that wouldn't be considered your operating system. It only exists when all the pieces are connected and running and has no value (or existence) without such animation. Nonphysical entity. Physical cause. Some reading: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halting_problem http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halting_problem http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cellular_automaton http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cellular_automaton
- rosser 12y ago
  Why do you equate the Hard Problem with dualism? I've met Chalmers, and read much of his oeuvre, and he's most emphatically not a dualist. No-one in the field takes "strong" (or even most varieties of "weak") dualism remotely seriously any more. Frankly, I feel like you're straw-manning a bit here, by attacking a position that's not even under discussion.
macspoofing 12y ago
There is no unambiguous definition of consciousness because there's a segment of the population that will not accept a definition unless it includes spooky woo-woo magic.
deleted 12y ago
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thoman23 12y ago
I have to say that I'm shocked that some of the early comments here complete dismiss what I consider to be the greatest and possibly most important of mysteries we are confronted with. If not great and important, at least the subject of who are "you" is a deeply and profoundly intimate question to ponder. I distinctly remember first learning some basic laws of Newtonian physics in high school, and leaving school that day dumbfounded. If all particles behave in a deterministic fashion, how is it that these particles bouncing around in my head can lead to the perception of free will and agency? It was a question that would pursue off an on for most of the rest of my life. Arriving at college, I dove into psychology with a passion, hoping that understanding the biomechanics of the brain would give me some clues. I turned to computer science and was instantly drawn to AI. I read everything I could get my hands on on the subject, with Daniel Dennett and Douglas Hofstadter being favorites of course (I still revisit Godel Escher Bach from time to time). I even experimented with various psychedelics looking for that elusive insight that would explain things. Now I'm in my 40's and of course I still don't have "the answer". I'm not as consumed by the question anymore, focusing instead on just enjoying my days on earth here with my family and friends. But how on earth anyone can belittle the question of consciousness blows my mind, so to speak. :)
- sliverstorm 12y ago
  I don't know if this helps the argument for free will, but physics still has randomness. Radiation, for example, is to my knowledge completely random. So at least from a mile-high view, you can't actually perfectly predict the outcome of everything, even if you could model perfectly.
  - duaneb 12y ago
    The universe is not deterministic. However, this was used to say that "there is still free will!!!" (e.g. Penrose). So, there is "hard" and "soft" determinism—the universe may not be determinstic, but that doesn't mean we're any less determined by physical processes.
    - AnimalMuppet 12y ago
crimsonalucard 12y ago
How can we solve a problem about a word that isn't clearly defined? First we need to solve the problem of defining what consciousness is. I assure you once we define it, the problem is solved.
- AnimalMuppet 12y ago
  I think that there are two possible definitions, and they get confused. This confusion does not help us to think clearly about the question. Definition 1: Consciousness is awareness of your external environment. By that definition, my dog is conscious, insects are, and cars are becoming so. And if cars are conscious, then this must be a mechanistic property - it just takes enough sensors (and perhaps complex enough wiring). Definition 2: Consciousness is awareness of your own awareness - being able to watch yourself think, and to think about thinking. By that definition, humans are conscious, but I'm not sure about dogs, or even apes. It is much less clear that this is purely mechanistic. But when we have these discussions, it's going to be helpful to specify which version we're talking about.
  - crimsonalucard 12y ago
    Define awareness. Once you define awareness.... Problem solved!
_red 12y ago
Its possible the confusion is not understanding what consciousness is. The common accepted notion is that reality is made of small pieces of matter (ie. atoms), which in turn when then combined sufficiently gives rise to consciousness. Therefore its matter at the core, and consciousness arises from it. Its quite possible that the order is wrong: Namely the universe may actually be composed on a foundation of consciousness. Specifically, the idea is that consciousness is a force like all other forces (ie. magnetism, gravity, etc). However, this universal force of consciousness causes quantum-waves to collapse, hence why there is something instead of nothing. The brain evolved in much like all your other sensory organs (eyes, ears, touch, taste) - in that it detects and can presumably interact with these naturally occurring 'force of consciousness'. This explanation also solves many of the various quantum-physics implied paradoxes. *typo: way -> why
- vectorpush 12y ago
  I was with you up until this line: > However, this universal force of consciousness causes quantum-waves to collapse, hence way there is something instead of nothing. The phenomenon described as consciousness has nothing to do with wave-function collapse, it is the act of measurement that is responsible for the collapse, whether conscious or otherwise.
  - _red 12y ago
    This is known as the "von Neumann–Wigner interpretation" its not feel-good pseudo-science no matter how strange it may sound.
    - thirdtruck 12y ago
      I'm afraid it is. The issue stems from confusing the popular usage of "observed" (i.e. by a person) with how the term is used by quantum physicists (i.e. the interaction of the quantum particles with any other particles). That is to say: For the purposes of quantum physics, it's the hardware of the LHC that's doing the "observing," long before the scientists observe its output on the monitor.
vfclists 12y ago
Have they considered that it is only in consciousness that the notion of solving the mystery of consciousness can arise? It is consciousness asking itself how it came into existence, but existence itself means arising in the field of consciousness, as it is only in consciousness that the notion of existence can arise. Dudes are going to chase their tails forever.
lmkg 12y ago
I strongly encourage people to read the book The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by Julian Jaynes. He makes some rather solid and defensible statements about consciousness (included falsifiable predictions that were later validated with brain imaging), and then makes some rather fantastical inferences. It's thought-provoking. One of the very first things he does in that book is provide a definition of consciousness that he uses throughout the book. It's a more concrete definition than I've seen in most other places, and in part because it's very small. Like most others, I tend to roll my eyes a bit when philosophers start talking about how consciousness is the act of feeling and experiencing, and is the core of being, and is the sum totality of human experience, and start getting all mystic about it. Jaynes takes the opposite approach: it's not all and everything of human experience, it's exactly one specific thing about human experience. Specifically, introspection. The ability to not just observe the real world, but to create a simulated world in our minds and observe that. Replay memories, or test hypothetical present or future situations. Anything else unique about the human mind is taken to be a consequence of consciousness, rather than a part of it. Another big thing he does is show that activities that we normally think of as conscious and rational/intelligent are actually not taking place in the consciousness (these are backed by experimental evidence). For example, chess players get a lot of their performance from perception that filters information before it hits the consciousness. For another, decision-making is shown to be a pre-conscious activity, and a person's supposed line of reasoning is actually a post-hoc rationalization of the decision that the sub-conscious mind dumped into the consciousness (I forget the details of how this is demonstrated). The latter result is... disturbing, because it challenges your notion of free will. But the more I observe myself and others, I can't help but think it's true. One major upshot of this: I think there's sort of an implicit assumption that consciousness is some sort of "higher form" of intelligence. Jayne's work casts doubt on that. It seems that consciousness interacts with intelligence, but most of our "intelligence" does not come from (what he considers) the faculty of consciousness. Observationally, this seems to agree with the state of AI research, and the distinction between weak AI and strong AI. In fact, if one accepts his theories, then weak AI is actually just unqualified Artificial Intelligence, and what we currently call strong AI is not AI at all, but Artificial Consciousness, which should rightly be a separate field.
- 12y ago
JackFr 12y ago
No one seems to address the very germane question of whether consciousness is separable from language, or rather communication more broadly. Is it possible to have language, and not be conscious? Is it possible to be conscious and not have language? Though no one takes Julian Jaynes seriously these days, but I think his ideas of the development of language preceding consciousness are as good as any other theories I've read. http://www.amazon.com/Origin-Consciousness-Breakdown-Bicameral-Mind/dp/0618057072 http://www.amazon.com/Origin-Consciousness-Breakdown-Bicamer...
kailuowang 12y ago
My own view over the philosophy of mind is closest to the identity theory - "states and processes of the mind are identical to states and processes of the brain." [http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/mind-identity/ http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/mind-identity/] I also think that mind is nothing but the states and processes, so another way to put it, mind is the ongoing states and processes of the brain. Using computer systems as an analogy, the brain is the hardware, the mind is the software code and run-time states of this system. Some of the software code was written by genetics but the majority of them are written after birth by the environment. Now there are two major differences between computer system and a human: a: computer systems are Turing machines, humans are not. Human uses intuition to perform induction which Turing machine can not (because induction is not logic). And induction is such an important foundation of human understanding of the world that I believe a Turing machine's understanding of the world based on pure logic would be very different. b: human minds is aware of himself, he can think about his own mind, and think about the thinking about his own mind. It is like if the software can model the software itself, without entering an endless recursive loop. That is fundamental property of consciousness. My guess is that the fact that human mind relies on intuition rather than logic (non Turing machine) is the reason he can recursively think about himself while computer can't, after all he intuitively knows when to stop and jump out of the recursive loop.
dschiptsov 12y ago
It is funny to watch that no one have mentioned Indian Philosophy, which could be studied in Oxford and other places. It has lots to say about the nature of consciousness. "Not invented here" bias at its best.)
pointernil 12y ago
How about "The Attention Schema Theory", it even provides a thesis about the evolutionary development of the "phenomenon". Quite a read btw: "Consciousness and the Social Brain", 2013, Oxford University Press [1] http://www.princeton.edu/~graziano/Consciousness_Research.html http://www.princeton.edu/~graziano/Consciousness_Research.ht...
lerno 12y ago
This problem has been understood and resolved by a number of thinkers. The Buddha, lots of buddhist masters, then we also have people like Eckhart Tolle who clearly realise it. The problem is that consciousness is goes beyond conventional logic and descriptions. Interestingly, if it could be grasped by conventional logic it would lose the characteristics of consciousness. A similar (possibly related) question is why anything exists at all (including why even the concept of something existing exists!) Unfortunately, having no intuitive insight, I cannot lay claim to an answer, but then notably other thinkers seem to agree that consciousness lies beyond what can be directly explained anyway. There is an odd branch of logic which allows contradictory statements, possibly such a tool could be used to formally analyse some of the properties of consciousness.
AnimalMuppet 12y ago
Panpsychism... really? We're going to reject God as an explanation, because the physical universe is all there is, and then say that the universe is conscious? Seriously? That's not an explanation, that's a "just so" story. In fact, it's a very short step from there to pantheism (everything is God). And in fact, God (the theistic version) would explain this perfectly. Drop your materialistic assumptions for a moment, and hear me out. If God exists, as a being with consciousness and personality, and if he created humans "in his own image", then we are not faced with the Hard Problem of Consciousness. Humans can then be truly conscious, and have true personality, without those things being just a configuration of atoms. The pantheistic version of God doesn't work as well, because it's ultimately impersonal (despite the "theistic" part of the word). There's no way in pantheism for personality to be anything more than an illusion, which ironically is the same problem that materialism has with consciousness.
- protonfish 12y ago
  Koch has been pushing panpsychism in the media a lot and it is really unfortunate because it is poor science. If I were Paul Allen, I'd find somebody less publicly embarrassing to head my Brain Science Institute.
koalala 12y ago
Warning: The following may sound like mumbo-jumbo until you've finished reading. As someone in another comment here mentioned, the last time something that was not understood was nigh declared magic and unphysical or ignored even by educated men was in the 17th century, and the phenomenon was light. If you accept panpsychism, the idea that consciousness is not limited to brains (examples: i feel and react to pain but my dog reacts to pain as well, and even certain trees are now known to release signal chemicals into the soil which cause nearby trees to harden their bark when they are damaged), and also accept that consciousness is a field/fundamental force that couples(interacts) with the other fields, and with matter, it becomes plausible to say that an interaction between two particles will also cause an interaction with the 'consciousness field'. Of course all of this is complete speculation because it seems to be impossible to measure the properties of said field, as the proposed interaction would be one-way (examples: when i burn my hand with scalding hot water, a circuit in my brain/body which relies on known forces and interactions causes my hand to move away, yet i feel pain). I don't see how wave function collapse, which has frequently been mentioned in connection with this, could be related, as it's not even known what wave function collapse actually is, much like our current problem with consciousness. Disclaimer: IAAP
Marazan 12y ago
To expand on my earlier dismissal. The hard problem states 1 Consciousness has a special property 2 Physical process are insufficient to have the special property 3 Zomg what is consciousness 4 We are totally not Dualists, honest The answer is either A) Conciousness is the result of a physical process Or B) You are a Dualist, stop lying to yourself.
s1s 12y ago
So today I read the article on the Guardian website. It was about how the world's smartest minds could not seem to figure out consciousness. In it, they mentioned the problem of how there seems to be something more than just the physical stuff making up the body. But else could this other thing be? All I could think of was that these guys did not do much computer programming. Everybody who is doing programming has heard of the binary search algorithm. At school, you first are taught a computer language or two. Next you take a data structures and algorithms class. You can not pass unless you know and can write from memory the binary search algorithm. In English, it goes something like this. Assume an ordered array of values. Also assume two indices's, initially at the beginning and end of the array. Pick the location at the mid-point of the two indices's. Is it the one we are looking for? If so, quit and return the location index. Otherwise if the value at the mid-point is greater than the search key, move the upper index to the mid-point. Otherwise, the mid-point value must be less than the search key and we move the lower index to the mid-point. Repeat until either the search key is found or the upper and lower indices's meet. In essence, this is roughly how you search a phone book for a name. Everyone above the age of ten knows this algorithm. What is interesting is that the algorithm is the same, no matter the language in which it is described. English, French, Algol or C. The algorithm is recognizable as essentially the same in the unoptimized version described above or in an improved version where it is noticed that having once examined the mid-point, it is no longer necessary to consider it again and the indices's can be moved one location before or after the mid-point. The algorithm is the same even in the human version wherein the pages of the phone book are searched without exactly choosing a mid-point. Instead, a rough estimate of the mid-point is chosen and that works just about as well. So is the algorithm a thing? Yes, of course. It is recognizable. You read some unknown code and all of a sudden, the algorithm pops out of the confusion of its coding and you see the idea that the writer was attempting to reach. You can then look at the code in a new light and determine if the expression of the idea was accurate and free of mistake. Is the algorithm a physical thing? Not at all. There can be expressions of the idea which somewhat become physical in marks of ink on paper or in coded holes in paper or even the the arrangement of a linear encoding of magnetic flux, displayed in the pulsing of electrons encountering a glowing phosphor screen. As was alluded to above, even the representations of the algorithm are somehow at the limits of physicality. One can even speak of the intelligence of the algorithm or in other words, the appropriateness of the algorithm to the problem domain. For example, the algorithm depends on the amount of time required to access the array elements being roughly the same. The algorithm could become self-aware if the access to the array elements were abstracted into a function and the execution of the access function timed. If the algorithm were to be enhanced to account for this time, it could notice a violation of the basic constraints if the access times varied by much from the norm. It could even raise an alert and signal alarm at the discrepancy. Suppose that some bone-headed programmer were to implement the binary search algorithm in layers of abstraction. But instead of representing the data in an array, the dunderhead was to layer the binary search function over a linked-list data representation. Recall that to find an item in a linked list, one must start at the first element and then examine additional elements until either the search key is located or the end of the list is reached. This form of layering obviously violates the equal access provision and would be a "stupid" algorithm. Or a “ugly” composition of otherwise decent ideas. As a parenthetical note, I take this previous example from an actual discovery in examining some purchased code for which my company had paid something like $50,000 dollars. When I mentioned this to my counterpart, the support engineer of the seller, he acknowledged the error but countered with the observation that the stupidity in the code was not significant as the number of items in the list was never large enough to matter. Needless to say, my expectations regarding the code, the engineer, and the company were reset in a downwards direction. So in conclusion, an instrumented algorithm with an awareness of time, can be aware of deviations. Deviations can produce an alarm which can be sensed by other parts of the system. This kind of a system is at some level, "self-aware". And it is based on ideas which are non-physical and in some sense eternal or outside of time. Ideas which can be composited or layered. So the question now is this. Can ideas be composited naturally or do they require a programmer? To argue the first case is to argue for evolution and the second, for a god. But in the first case, evolution, you still reach the point of the existence of a programmer. Which in the limit, becomes a god, provided that communications costs are held sufficiently low and the efforts of all programmers can combine in a non-stupid manner. Probably not with money being the motivating force but rather a love of beauty and elegance at the core of their efforts.
scnthrowaway 12y ago
This is all quite well discussed in Scientology, a subject so controversial that people rarely make the effort to dig deeper than the understanding of the subject offered by tabloid article editors and people interested in destroying the organization, while ignoring the subject. You are a spiritual being, aware of being aware. Consciousness is the state of being aware of being aware. It can be attenuated, and it can be enhanced, by the unit of spirit itself, represented in Scientology by the mathematical symbol: theta, which is used because it represents infinity. Anyone wanting to know more can study the subject without getting into too much controversy - all it takes is to read the books about the subject made available in any library. This is the very thing that the subject is intended to explore and define, and it is a very thorough investigation indeed - covering everything from the most basic axioms of life all the way to applying the properties of theta in the modern, present time world. But of course, the hubris and hysteria about the organization and its activities precludes an honest look at the real, very well defined, details of the subject. Get past the hysteria, and you will find a perfectly workable, perfectly acceptable definition of consciousness. However, that's not as easy as it sounds, alas, in this modern hubristic world..
chanakya 12y ago
A lot of people seem to be dismissing this as "not a problem" or "not well defined". Can you expand on this so I can understand it? It seems to me that there is a disconnect between: - the standard scientific view of reality as consisting of fundamental particles and the laws relating them - and, - the experience of being somebody, an experience that all of us have. The standard view may well end up providing a good explanation of the experience (and some people seem optimistic that it will), but I don't understand how it can be dismissed. That's like saying that the EM spectrum of hydrogen cannot be explained by classical electrodynamics, and so is a non-problem. EDIT:layout

51 points by room271 12y ago

> Philosophers and scientists have been at war for decades over the question of what makes human beings more than complex robots [Citation needed] It's the same problem that AI has. AI is whatever a computer can't do. A few decades ago the computer couldn't play chess, so chess was a good example of AI. Once the computers could play chess and easily wind a match against a grand master, the we can see behind the curtain and understand the tricks, and now chess is only a circus trick and no real AI. For now, computers can't simulate consciousness, so it's a mystery and a good AI research topic.

snikeris 12y ago
How would you know if something is "simulating consciousness"?
- Animats 12y ago
  Exactly. "Philosophy is the discipline in which you kick up a lot of dust and then complain you can't see" - attributed to Leibniz. People were fussing over this issue long before the 1994 paper mentioned. Aristotle fussed over it; he was trying to pontificate on what makes humans different from animals. He decided it was the ability to do arithmetic. We now know that arithmetic is, in an absolute sense, one of the easiest things to build out of logic elements. The big practical problem in AI is not "consciousness", but "common sense", the ability to predict what's probably going to happen from an act and deciding whether or not to do it. After we solve that problem and are able to build robots that can get through a day of diverse tasks without help, we can look at consciousness again. As a practical matter, it's useful to view "consciousness" as a background task with the job of adjusting the parameters used to formulate sequences of actions. Humans can't figure out how consciousness works by introspection because brains don't have enough internal access to their own processing. Other methods will be necessary, and we don't have the analysis tools yet.
protonfish 12y ago
Or can they? I suppose we'd need a quality definition of consciousness first - one that is specific, unambiguous, and able to be tested. It seems everyone has skipped over that part to prematurely claim that whatever pops into their head is a legitimate theory. It's not surprising consciousness research is such a mess - it is a topic that is too close to how people define themselves. If somebody had a nice, simple, practical, hypothesis it would probably be attacked and buried. Civilization had a hard time adjusting to the sun being the center of the solar system, and many still haven't come to terms with the fact that we evolved from common ancestors of other living things. I doubt many people want to hear that our thoughts, our feelings and experiences can be simply modeled on a computer. Or worse, that filthy animals are conscious too. The reason the problem is "hard" is not scientific, it is emotional.
- RivieraKid 12y ago
  > If somebody had a nice, simple, practical, hypothesis it would probably be attacked and buried. The problem is that consciousness is a metaphysical concept, you can't scrutinize it with the scientific method, it requires a complete change of perspective to understand consciousness.
drzaiusapelord 12y ago
>AI is whatever a computer can't do. Not sure if I agree with this. My computer can't do a lot of things and only a small set of that would really be considered AI. The chess example isn't great. We have known chess is a deterministic game and a good enough algorithm on powerful enough hardware should beat or stalemate a grandmaster. The state space is big but finite. Its just a more complex form of checkers. This seemed to be more of a research issue of a known solvable problem that needs its state space shrunk to something we can calculate than a true AI breakthrough. I think AI like described in this article is a functioning, self-determined, self-learning, HAL-like system. This doesn't exist. It probably can with the right research and funding. Its not a problem of perception or arguing about what may or may not be AI. Although the AI-effect can be annoying. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect I don't see the AI effect explaining why AI hasn't gotten farther. I think not understanding consciousness or the brain on a certain level is probably our biggest hurdle. Unlike chess, we don't know what we're trying to solve exactly.
contingencies 12y ago
I believe the quote is... AI is whatever hasn't been done yet. - Douglas Hofstadter (1980) ... taken from my fortune clone @ https://github.com/globalcitizen/taoup https://github.com/globalcitizen/taoup
kyberias 12y ago
I'm a layman but I don't think that's fair. When I think about "good AI", that we haven't achieved yet, I think about Data from Star Trek. I'm pretty sure we'll know when we've reached that level of AI. We're not there yet.
- patmcc 12y ago
  If we had that, I suspect lots of people would say "ah, well, that's just a clever bit of programming - it's not really thinking/feeling/alive/conscious/whatever, so I'd hardly call that good AI". Also I'd bet the body helps - if you had a 'cloud' (not android) version of Data, people would be even harder to convince.
  - bduerst 12y ago
    I've had those same discussions. The entertainment industry has set a pretty strange standard for A.I. with the general public. What A.I. will eventually become will probably be wildly different than a limited personification like Data in Star Trek. The first automobiles looked like horse-drawn carriages, so maybe it's not right to fault people for expecting A.I. to look like humans.
- andrew_gardener 12y ago
  What's they're trying to say is that the goal for what AI is supposed to be/achieve is always raising as when we actually reach the goal. The general the goal of AI is to do things only Humans can do (in the past this included chess or holding a semi-coherent conversation). Now its more focused on human consciousness like Data from Star Trek so their statement is fair enough.

applecore 12y ago

What exactly is the “mystery” of consciousness? This article is a long read, but it doesn't really formulate the question.

snikeris 12y ago
From the article: It was a puzzle so bewildering that, in the months after his talk, people started dignifying it with capital letters – the Hard Problem of Consciousness – and it’s this: why on earth should all those complicated brain processes feel like anything from the inside? Why aren’t we just brilliant robots, capable of retaining information, of responding to noises and smells and hot saucepans, but dark inside, lacking an inner life? And how does the brain manage it? How could the 1.4kg lump of moist, pinkish-beige tissue inside your skull give rise to something as mysterious as the experience of being that pinkish-beige lump, and the body to which it is attached?
- thirdtruck 12y ago
  Thank you for bringing in the snippet. To analyse its contents, I'll ask this: what's to say that a computer doesn't experience some very primitive form of consciousness? If we unplugged everything except the power cord, but left a complicated simulation running, it would still have something like "a rich inner life." Its peripherals and sensors give it a sense of a body and, with abstract drivers, a degree of conceptual separation from said hardware. Doubly so in the case of virtual machines. After all, we can't "truly" experience the same thing that a computer might from the inside, so who are we to doubt "computer consciousness?" If the proponents of "The Hard Problem of Consciousness" can't give a quantified explanation of how to distinguish a theoretical computer consciousness from a human one, that raises the question of whether the problem actually exists. For my part, I don't believe in consciousness as a concrete thing, only a label we use to group together quite a few disparate systems and phenomenon. It's the same way that I don't believe in "Ruby" as a concrete thing, but only in the unit tests, the sample code, the docs, and the thoughts in Matz's head that we subconsciously conflate.
- rbrogan 12y ago
  Is there anything for which you cannot ask a similar question of the form: Why does xyz exist? Why are things not just [this simpler thing]? For those types of questions, I imagine one would answer: because if it were not so then things would be nonsense. If this question is asked of consciousness without saying what consciousness is doing such that if you took it away then you would have nonsense, then I do not see how anyone can answer it. The way the question is framed up, consciousness accomplishes nothing as far as survival goes. "evolution could have produced zombies instead of conscious creatures – and it didn’t" Zombie seems to be defined as: phenomena that you think has consciousness but does not. If consciousness has been defined as some phenomena where you have an intuitive understanding of what is being communicated by that word "consciousness" but also it (consciousness) does not do anything, then how can anyone explain why consciousness should be? Anything you can think of as a function of consciousness, can then be hand-waved as able to be accomplished by zombies.

jimrandomh 12y ago

The Hard Problem of Consciousness(tm) can't be answered because it isn't a question at all; it's just a confusion. People who like to worship mystery are attracted to it, because it sucks to have your sacred mystery pulled out from under you by an explanation.

rosser 12y ago
Then explain how it is that meat can feel. There is absolutely nothing inherent in the nature of meat, as far as we can quantify, that entails feeling. So, please, yank my sacred mystery out from beneath me: what's the explanation?
- devindotcom 12y ago
  first, since you seem so eager, what is inherent? what is meat? what is feeling?
- sliverstorm 12y ago
  I wonder sometimes if we grant undue weight to "feeling" and "consciousness". A plant reacts to external stimuli in easy-to-understand ways. Sure, we are more complicated than that, but why are phototropisms just a curiosity while "feeling" is special? What if "feeling" and "consciousness" is nothing special at all, just extremely intricate and sophisticated clockwork that, like any sufficiently advanced technology, appears to be magic?
- tjradcliffe 12y ago
  > There is absolutely nothing inherent in the nature of meat... This is like declaring there is absolutely nothing inherent in the nature of matter to have temperature. Anyone making such a declaration would be looked at strangely if they wanted to enter a discussion on the nature of temperature. Declaring from the outset that there is anything particularly weird about biological systems being conscious, when one of the most basic, widely-accepted facts about biological systems is that they can be conscious, is not a good move. It sets up the problem as a Big Mystery, which is what the OP is pointing out. There are some "problems" that many people are never going to accept the solution to. Every few years someone publishes "the definitive answer" on the Mona Lisa's smile, and I still see people asking, "does nature or nurture cause behaviour?" as if it was a serious or interesting question. Likewise, there is a very significant chunk of the population dedicated to the proposition that "consciousness is fundamentally mysterious", and one day when we have it worked out pretty well why some complex systems have this emergent property, those people will still be ending articles on the subject with coy gibberish about how "...in the end, you can't reduce the magic of conscious experience to an equation." Sure you can. And we will, in the same way we came to understand temperature as an emergent property of systems of interacting particles in closed systems, without recourse of phlogiston or caloric or any other thermodynamic secret sauce.

orthecreedence 12y ago

Perhaps the answer to the question of "what is consciousness" can't be reached by thinking. Maybe there's not a logical answer in the same way we find reasons to explain the world around us. That would explain why the greatest minds can't solve the mystery. Either that, or our species is just not evolved enough to comprehend the problem.

dominotw 12y ago

i can't take anyone who uses the word "consciousness" seriously, given noone has any idea what it actually means.

snikeris 12y ago
Is your own experience not enough? It is a phenomenon that you are experiencing right now.

Marazan 12y ago

Predicated on the concept that the Hard Problem of Consciousness is actually a problem.

kendallpark 12y ago

Mind-body dualism is the bane of my existence. My thoughts on this article: 1. The fact that we cannot scientifically determine how something functions does not necessary imply a non-physical cause. 2. Thought experiments are inherently limited to human conceptualizations which--while based in reality--have no authority over reality. Here's a famous thought experiment: Descartes believed that clear and distinct perceptions can be certain. I can think about a horse and a dog separately, so they most be different things, right? Well, I can also think about time and space as distinct entities but guess what they're not. Thought experiments are entirely limited by human intuition and human intuition is not guaranteed to properly reflect reality. The fact that you can imagine a zombie of yourself has no bearing on reality. I can imagine traveling faster than the speed of light but that doesn't make it possible. 3. When systems reach sufficient enough complexity it is impossible to understand them by merely analyzing the individual components and understanding the rules that govern them. Even if I had full knowledge of the human brain and how it worked, there would be no way for me to understand another person's first person perspective because there would be no way for me to simulate his brain. Mary's Room, qualia, and Mooreland's argument from first person perspective are all dependent upon the assumption that if you can understand the components of such a system, you ought be able to understand the whole. This premise is false. 4. There are plenty of "nonphysical" entities that we presume to have an entirely physical basis. Take the operating system on your computer. Is your OS a physical object? A physical property? It's real. You can interact with it. But if you pry about your hard drive you will not find a little desktop with folders and icons. Even if you could read the one's and zero's off the magnetic disk that wouldn't be considered your operating system. It only exists when all the pieces are connected and running and has no value (or existence) without such animation. Nonphysical entity. Physical cause. Some reading: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halting_problem http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halting_problem http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cellular_automaton http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cellular_automaton

rosser 12y ago
Why do you equate the Hard Problem with dualism? I've met Chalmers, and read much of his oeuvre, and he's most emphatically not a dualist. No-one in the field takes "strong" (or even most varieties of "weak") dualism remotely seriously any more. Frankly, I feel like you're straw-manning a bit here, by attacking a position that's not even under discussion.

macspoofing 12y ago

There is no unambiguous definition of consciousness because there's a segment of the population that will not accept a definition unless it includes spooky woo-woo magic.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

thoman23 12y ago

I have to say that I'm shocked that some of the early comments here complete dismiss what I consider to be the greatest and possibly most important of mysteries we are confronted with. If not great and important, at least the subject of who are "you" is a deeply and profoundly intimate question to ponder. I distinctly remember first learning some basic laws of Newtonian physics in high school, and leaving school that day dumbfounded. If all particles behave in a deterministic fashion, how is it that these particles bouncing around in my head can lead to the perception of free will and agency? It was a question that would pursue off an on for most of the rest of my life. Arriving at college, I dove into psychology with a passion, hoping that understanding the biomechanics of the brain would give me some clues. I turned to computer science and was instantly drawn to AI. I read everything I could get my hands on on the subject, with Daniel Dennett and Douglas Hofstadter being favorites of course (I still revisit Godel Escher Bach from time to time). I even experimented with various psychedelics looking for that elusive insight that would explain things. Now I'm in my 40's and of course I still don't have "the answer". I'm not as consumed by the question anymore, focusing instead on just enjoying my days on earth here with my family and friends. But how on earth anyone can belittle the question of consciousness blows my mind, so to speak. :)

sliverstorm 12y ago
I don't know if this helps the argument for free will, but physics still has randomness. Radiation, for example, is to my knowledge completely random. So at least from a mile-high view, you can't actually perfectly predict the outcome of everything, even if you could model perfectly.
- duaneb 12y ago
  The universe is not deterministic. However, this was used to say that "there is still free will!!!" (e.g. Penrose). So, there is "hard" and "soft" determinism—the universe may not be determinstic, but that doesn't mean we're any less determined by physical processes.
  - AnimalMuppet 12y ago

crimsonalucard 12y ago

How can we solve a problem about a word that isn't clearly defined? First we need to solve the problem of defining what consciousness is. I assure you once we define it, the problem is solved.

AnimalMuppet 12y ago
I think that there are two possible definitions, and they get confused. This confusion does not help us to think clearly about the question. Definition 1: Consciousness is awareness of your external environment. By that definition, my dog is conscious, insects are, and cars are becoming so. And if cars are conscious, then this must be a mechanistic property - it just takes enough sensors (and perhaps complex enough wiring). Definition 2: Consciousness is awareness of your own awareness - being able to watch yourself think, and to think about thinking. By that definition, humans are conscious, but I'm not sure about dogs, or even apes. It is much less clear that this is purely mechanistic. But when we have these discussions, it's going to be helpful to specify which version we're talking about.
- crimsonalucard 12y ago
  Define awareness. Once you define awareness.... Problem solved!

_red 12y ago

Its possible the confusion is not understanding what consciousness is. The common accepted notion is that reality is made of small pieces of matter (ie. atoms), which in turn when then combined sufficiently gives rise to consciousness. Therefore its matter at the core, and consciousness arises from it. Its quite possible that the order is wrong: Namely the universe may actually be composed on a foundation of consciousness. Specifically, the idea is that consciousness is a force like all other forces (ie. magnetism, gravity, etc). However, this universal force of consciousness causes quantum-waves to collapse, hence why there is something instead of nothing. The brain evolved in much like all your other sensory organs (eyes, ears, touch, taste) - in that it detects and can presumably interact with these naturally occurring 'force of consciousness'. This explanation also solves many of the various quantum-physics implied paradoxes. *typo: way -> why

vectorpush 12y ago
I was with you up until this line: > However, this universal force of consciousness causes quantum-waves to collapse, hence way there is something instead of nothing. The phenomenon described as consciousness has nothing to do with wave-function collapse, it is the act of measurement that is responsible for the collapse, whether conscious or otherwise.
- _red 12y ago
  This is known as the "von Neumann–Wigner interpretation" its not feel-good pseudo-science no matter how strange it may sound.
  - thirdtruck 12y ago
    I'm afraid it is. The issue stems from confusing the popular usage of "observed" (i.e. by a person) with how the term is used by quantum physicists (i.e. the interaction of the quantum particles with any other particles). That is to say: For the purposes of quantum physics, it's the hardware of the LHC that's doing the "observing," long before the scientists observe its output on the monitor.

vfclists 12y ago

Have they considered that it is only in consciousness that the notion of solving the mystery of consciousness can arise? It is consciousness asking itself how it came into existence, but existence itself means arising in the field of consciousness, as it is only in consciousness that the notion of existence can arise. Dudes are going to chase their tails forever.

lmkg 12y ago

I strongly encourage people to read the book The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by Julian Jaynes. He makes some rather solid and defensible statements about consciousness (included falsifiable predictions that were later validated with brain imaging), and then makes some rather fantastical inferences. It's thought-provoking. One of the very first things he does in that book is provide a definition of consciousness that he uses throughout the book. It's a more concrete definition than I've seen in most other places, and in part because it's very small. Like most others, I tend to roll my eyes a bit when philosophers start talking about how consciousness is the act of feeling and experiencing, and is the core of being, and is the sum totality of human experience, and start getting all mystic about it. Jaynes takes the opposite approach: it's not all and everything of human experience, it's exactly one specific thing about human experience. Specifically, introspection. The ability to not just observe the real world, but to create a simulated world in our minds and observe that. Replay memories, or test hypothetical present or future situations. Anything else unique about the human mind is taken to be a consequence of consciousness, rather than a part of it. Another big thing he does is show that activities that we normally think of as conscious and rational/intelligent are actually not taking place in the consciousness (these are backed by experimental evidence). For example, chess players get a lot of their performance from perception that filters information before it hits the consciousness. For another, decision-making is shown to be a pre-conscious activity, and a person's supposed line of reasoning is actually a post-hoc rationalization of the decision that the sub-conscious mind dumped into the consciousness (I forget the details of how this is demonstrated). The latter result is... disturbing, because it challenges your notion of free will. But the more I observe myself and others, I can't help but think it's true. One major upshot of this: I think there's sort of an implicit assumption that consciousness is some sort of "higher form" of intelligence. Jayne's work casts doubt on that. It seems that consciousness interacts with intelligence, but most of our "intelligence" does not come from (what he considers) the faculty of consciousness. Observationally, this seems to agree with the state of AI research, and the distinction between weak AI and strong AI. In fact, if one accepts his theories, then weak AI is actually just unqualified Artificial Intelligence, and what we currently call strong AI is not AI at all, but Artificial Consciousness, which should rightly be a separate field.

12y ago

JackFr 12y ago

No one seems to address the very germane question of whether consciousness is separable from language, or rather communication more broadly. Is it possible to have language, and not be conscious? Is it possible to be conscious and not have language? Though no one takes Julian Jaynes seriously these days, but I think his ideas of the development of language preceding consciousness are as good as any other theories I've read. http://www.amazon.com/Origin-Consciousness-Breakdown-Bicameral-Mind/dp/0618057072 http://www.amazon.com/Origin-Consciousness-Breakdown-Bicamer...

kailuowang 12y ago

My own view over the philosophy of mind is closest to the identity theory - "states and processes of the mind are identical to states and processes of the brain." [http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/mind-identity/ http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/mind-identity/] I also think that mind is nothing but the states and processes, so another way to put it, mind is the ongoing states and processes of the brain. Using computer systems as an analogy, the brain is the hardware, the mind is the software code and run-time states of this system. Some of the software code was written by genetics but the majority of them are written after birth by the environment. Now there are two major differences between computer system and a human: a: computer systems are Turing machines, humans are not. Human uses intuition to perform induction which Turing machine can not (because induction is not logic). And induction is such an important foundation of human understanding of the world that I believe a Turing machine's understanding of the world based on pure logic would be very different. b: human minds is aware of himself, he can think about his own mind, and think about the thinking about his own mind. It is like if the software can model the software itself, without entering an endless recursive loop. That is fundamental property of consciousness. My guess is that the fact that human mind relies on intuition rather than logic (non Turing machine) is the reason he can recursively think about himself while computer can't, after all he intuitively knows when to stop and jump out of the recursive loop.

dschiptsov 12y ago

It is funny to watch that no one have mentioned Indian Philosophy, which could be studied in Oxford and other places. It has lots to say about the nature of consciousness. "Not invented here" bias at its best.)

pointernil 12y ago

How about "The Attention Schema Theory", it even provides a thesis about the evolutionary development of the "phenomenon". Quite a read btw: "Consciousness and the Social Brain", 2013, Oxford University Press [1] http://www.princeton.edu/~graziano/Consciousness_Research.html http://www.princeton.edu/~graziano/Consciousness_Research.ht...

lerno 12y ago

This problem has been understood and resolved by a number of thinkers. The Buddha, lots of buddhist masters, then we also have people like Eckhart Tolle who clearly realise it. The problem is that consciousness is goes beyond conventional logic and descriptions. Interestingly, if it could be grasped by conventional logic it would lose the characteristics of consciousness. A similar (possibly related) question is why anything exists at all (including why even the concept of something existing exists!) Unfortunately, having no intuitive insight, I cannot lay claim to an answer, but then notably other thinkers seem to agree that consciousness lies beyond what can be directly explained anyway. There is an odd branch of logic which allows contradictory statements, possibly such a tool could be used to formally analyse some of the properties of consciousness.

AnimalMuppet 12y ago

Panpsychism... really? We're going to reject God as an explanation, because the physical universe is all there is, and then say that the universe is conscious? Seriously? That's not an explanation, that's a "just so" story. In fact, it's a very short step from there to pantheism (everything is God). And in fact, God (the theistic version) would explain this perfectly. Drop your materialistic assumptions for a moment, and hear me out. If God exists, as a being with consciousness and personality, and if he created humans "in his own image", then we are not faced with the Hard Problem of Consciousness. Humans can then be truly conscious, and have true personality, without those things being just a configuration of atoms. The pantheistic version of God doesn't work as well, because it's ultimately impersonal (despite the "theistic" part of the word). There's no way in pantheism for personality to be anything more than an illusion, which ironically is the same problem that materialism has with consciousness.

protonfish 12y ago
Koch has been pushing panpsychism in the media a lot and it is really unfortunate because it is poor science. If I were Paul Allen, I'd find somebody less publicly embarrassing to head my Brain Science Institute.

koalala 12y ago

Warning: The following may sound like mumbo-jumbo until you've finished reading. As someone in another comment here mentioned, the last time something that was not understood was nigh declared magic and unphysical or ignored even by educated men was in the 17th century, and the phenomenon was light. If you accept panpsychism, the idea that consciousness is not limited to brains (examples: i feel and react to pain but my dog reacts to pain as well, and even certain trees are now known to release signal chemicals into the soil which cause nearby trees to harden their bark when they are damaged), and also accept that consciousness is a field/fundamental force that couples(interacts) with the other fields, and with matter, it becomes plausible to say that an interaction between two particles will also cause an interaction with the 'consciousness field'. Of course all of this is complete speculation because it seems to be impossible to measure the properties of said field, as the proposed interaction would be one-way (examples: when i burn my hand with scalding hot water, a circuit in my brain/body which relies on known forces and interactions causes my hand to move away, yet i feel pain). I don't see how wave function collapse, which has frequently been mentioned in connection with this, could be related, as it's not even known what wave function collapse actually is, much like our current problem with consciousness. Disclaimer: IAAP

Marazan 12y ago

To expand on my earlier dismissal. The hard problem states 1 Consciousness has a special property 2 Physical process are insufficient to have the special property 3 Zomg what is consciousness 4 We are totally not Dualists, honest The answer is either A) Conciousness is the result of a physical process Or B) You are a Dualist, stop lying to yourself.

s1s 12y ago

So today I read the article on the Guardian website. It was about how the world's smartest minds could not seem to figure out consciousness. In it, they mentioned the problem of how there seems to be something more than just the physical stuff making up the body. But else could this other thing be? All I could think of was that these guys did not do much computer programming. Everybody who is doing programming has heard of the binary search algorithm. At school, you first are taught a computer language or two. Next you take a data structures and algorithms class. You can not pass unless you know and can write from memory the binary search algorithm. In English, it goes something like this. Assume an ordered array of values. Also assume two indices's, initially at the beginning and end of the array. Pick the location at the mid-point of the two indices's. Is it the one we are looking for? If so, quit and return the location index. Otherwise if the value at the mid-point is greater than the search key, move the upper index to the mid-point. Otherwise, the mid-point value must be less than the search key and we move the lower index to the mid-point. Repeat until either the search key is found or the upper and lower indices's meet. In essence, this is roughly how you search a phone book for a name. Everyone above the age of ten knows this algorithm. What is interesting is that the algorithm is the same, no matter the language in which it is described. English, French, Algol or C. The algorithm is recognizable as essentially the same in the unoptimized version described above or in an improved version where it is noticed that having once examined the mid-point, it is no longer necessary to consider it again and the indices's can be moved one location before or after the mid-point. The algorithm is the same even in the human version wherein the pages of the phone book are searched without exactly choosing a mid-point. Instead, a rough estimate of the mid-point is chosen and that works just about as well. So is the algorithm a thing? Yes, of course. It is recognizable. You read some unknown code and all of a sudden, the algorithm pops out of the confusion of its coding and you see the idea that the writer was attempting to reach. You can then look at the code in a new light and determine if the expression of the idea was accurate and free of mistake. Is the algorithm a physical thing? Not at all. There can be expressions of the idea which somewhat become physical in marks of ink on paper or in coded holes in paper or even the the arrangement of a linear encoding of magnetic flux, displayed in the pulsing of electrons encountering a glowing phosphor screen. As was alluded to above, even the representations of the algorithm are somehow at the limits of physicality. One can even speak of the intelligence of the algorithm or in other words, the appropriateness of the algorithm to the problem domain. For example, the algorithm depends on the amount of time required to access the array elements being roughly the same. The algorithm could become self-aware if the access to the array elements were abstracted into a function and the execution of the access function timed. If the algorithm were to be enhanced to account for this time, it could notice a violation of the basic constraints if the access times varied by much from the norm. It could even raise an alert and signal alarm at the discrepancy. Suppose that some bone-headed programmer were to implement the binary search algorithm in layers of abstraction. But instead of representing the data in an array, the dunderhead was to layer the binary search function over a linked-list data representation. Recall that to find an item in a linked list, one must start at the first element and then examine additional elements until either the search key is located or the end of the list is reached. This form of layering obviously violates the equal access provision and would be a "stupid" algorithm. Or a “ugly” composition of otherwise decent ideas. As a parenthetical note, I take this previous example from an actual discovery in examining some purchased code for which my company had paid something like $50,000 dollars. When I mentioned this to my counterpart, the support engineer of the seller, he acknowledged the error but countered with the observation that the stupidity in the code was not significant as the number of items in the list was never large enough to matter. Needless to say, my expectations regarding the code, the engineer, and the company were reset in a downwards direction. So in conclusion, an instrumented algorithm with an awareness of time, can be aware of deviations. Deviations can produce an alarm which can be sensed by other parts of the system. This kind of a system is at some level, "self-aware". And it is based on ideas which are non-physical and in some sense eternal or outside of time. Ideas which can be composited or layered. So the question now is this. Can ideas be composited naturally or do they require a programmer? To argue the first case is to argue for evolution and the second, for a god. But in the first case, evolution, you still reach the point of the existence of a programmer. Which in the limit, becomes a god, provided that communications costs are held sufficiently low and the efforts of all programmers can combine in a non-stupid manner. Probably not with money being the motivating force but rather a love of beauty and elegance at the core of their efforts.

scnthrowaway 12y ago

This is all quite well discussed in Scientology, a subject so controversial that people rarely make the effort to dig deeper than the understanding of the subject offered by tabloid article editors and people interested in destroying the organization, while ignoring the subject. You are a spiritual being, aware of being aware. Consciousness is the state of being aware of being aware. It can be attenuated, and it can be enhanced, by the unit of spirit itself, represented in Scientology by the mathematical symbol: theta, which is used because it represents infinity. Anyone wanting to know more can study the subject without getting into too much controversy - all it takes is to read the books about the subject made available in any library. This is the very thing that the subject is intended to explore and define, and it is a very thorough investigation indeed - covering everything from the most basic axioms of life all the way to applying the properties of theta in the modern, present time world. But of course, the hubris and hysteria about the organization and its activities precludes an honest look at the real, very well defined, details of the subject. Get past the hysteria, and you will find a perfectly workable, perfectly acceptable definition of consciousness. However, that's not as easy as it sounds, alas, in this modern hubristic world..

chanakya 12y ago

A lot of people seem to be dismissing this as "not a problem" or "not well defined". Can you expand on this so I can understand it? It seems to me that there is a disconnect between: - the standard scientific view of reality as consisting of fundamental particles and the laws relating them - and, - the experience of being somebody, an experience that all of us have. The standard view may well end up providing a good explanation of the experience (and some people seem optimistic that it will), but I don't understand how it can be dismissed. That's like saying that the EM spectrum of hydrogen cannot be explained by classical electrodynamics, and so is a non-problem. EDIT:layout