My personal preference is for panexperientialism (essentially a bare bones panpsychism), with the idea that the phenomenon is somehow connected with change, and belongs to anything capable of change in some way and is probably a fundamental property of nature, as fundamental as space or time.
It's important to divorce consciousness from all ideas of "thought", "will" etc. to consider it's essence which is more connected with "awareness of being", though even that is too complex I think.
Obviously this is complete conjecture, but it has growing philosophical support - at least as an idea worth discussing - I think.
Probably because consciousness requires some kind of underlying mental processes, which take time to achieve. I can only guess that it's similar to an instance of a computer program such as a web browser, i.e., it isn't a "thing" itself but is built out of a multitude of underlying calculations on a physical computer.
This also implies to me that consciousness, not being a physical thing itself, comes and goes within the brain, with the sleep cycle or just through lack of attention. The only interaction between one instance of consciousness and the following one would then be via memories.
Yes. The way I think about it, to be conscious, one has to be conscious of something. The only way to do that is to have a representation of that thing in memory. When the representation matches incoming sense data we then perceive the relevant thing.
Thus, a single atom cannot be conscious. It could at a stretch be regarded as a miniature body, perhaps, but could it contain a memory system? Presumably not.
I don't know about panexperientialism. My understanding of panpsychism is that it means that everything in the universe is at least a little bit conscious. Which I doubt for the reasons I gave. I don't see how the universe as a whole could be conscious, either, any more than a child in the womb could be. There's not enough interaction between its body and the environment. Of course the universe as a whole lacks any environment.
Indeed. To go even farther, I suspect that there is nothing other than consciousness. There are no particles and forces, only awareness and will. The stuff of physics is emergent from statistical properties of consciousness over a large scale.
A difficulty is that it may interact with questions about the nature of existence and the nature of time. Would consciousness work properly in a deterministic block universe? What would be the relationship between my consciousness now and my consciousness of 10 seconds ago, do they both exist independently? Could you have consciousness that worked in a spacial dimension instead of time, by writing out the relevant calculations on a sheet of paper?
Why not entertain the notion that matter is consciousness? It doesn't just feel like something to be a particular atom, that particular atom exists because it feels like something to be that particular atom.
Everytime I think about this, I end up with "the fact that something is not in the state it desires to be in seems sufficient and necessary".
Maybe electrochemical imbalance is what's experienced as consciousness, all the way down to the smallest particles (or even beyond) - then, organic consciousness would just be an immense abstraction of the same thing that drives physics itself.
I feel like this is satisfying, but then again, I'm not Joscha Bach :-)
It's axiomatic. The universe exists because feeling exists. Physical matter is subjective experience. More complex matter up to and including the human brain represents more complex states of subjective experience. The processes in the brain feel like something because a process is a thing.
If my consciousness is only the consciousness of a particular atom, or more likely a fundamental particle like an electron, why do I have the illusion that I'm an entire human animal? How would my vision, for example, be sent to every election in my body, for it to be independently conscious?
And why can cancer hide from my consciousness? If we are a single particle, we can't possibly interact with the others in the way we do - why is that one particle special. And if we are a gestalt, why is it that some of the parts are less important than others. Nerves nicely explain why we are more aware of our hands and lips than the action of our appendix - a singular atomic consciousness can't, and neither can an equally weighted gestalt.
Manzotti’s account (as described in the article) ignores dreams, or the fact that directly zapping the brain elicits experience (e.g. magnetic stimulation of the visual cortex triggers colorful flashes known as phosphenes).
Graziani’s approach is more interesting, as a theory of attention, but falls short on qualia, and focuses on peculiarities of the human brain, assuming that a cerebral cortex is necessary for generating a conscious experience.
My pet theory is that consciousness can be modeled as a mathematical dual of the physical world. Think Voronoi diagrams vs. Delaunay triangulation. They are distinct, imbued with their own properties, but inextricably linked in that you can generate one from the other.
You could call dreams something like running your mental models on training sets. If it’s physical when it’s electrons and silicon, can it be physical in the brain as well?
What makes you believe that your conscious perceptions have any specific (let alone regularizeable) kind of relationship to reality at all? In all likelihood, conscious perceptions are guided entirely by evolution, emphasizing those aspects of reality needed to keep us alive and filtering out those we can safely ignore.
> conscious perceptions are guided entirely by evolution, emphasizing those aspects of reality needed to keep us alive and filtering out those we can safely ignore.
It's also known that it's often enough evolutionary advantageous having the model of the surroundings which is more accurate than that of your competition (There's some paper I've read about that, I just don't have the time to find it now. Maybe somebody has some more ready).
Therefore the successful products of evolution correctly reflect "outside world" in their models, and even have the "safety mechanisms" and "error correction" facilities (based on the feedback, of course). There are even experiments with people: if you'd get the glasses that invert the picture you see, you'd for a while see the world top down, but if you wear them long enough, the internal adjustment of the model would happen and you'd see again up as up, even if the "signal" is provably reversed compared to what you received for your whole life.
On the opposite side (that the "accurate enough" is not "always correct") we also already know the examples where the "accuracy" breaks in humans: that's the cause of people ascribing to the agency of gods the phenomena with purely natural causes. There wasn't evolutionary need for an intrinsic development of more accurate model of these phenomena (e.g. what makes the Sun move across the sky or what the stars are). The scientific method, luckily, allowed humans as a group to overcome these limitations, e.g. Aristarchus, some 2200 years ago, that is, at least 200 years BCE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Sizes_and_Distances_(Ar... (note, at that time the term "science" still didn't exist).
Re. Flipping images I actually experienced it first hand. I live in continental Europe where cars are driven on the right side of the road.
A few years ago, I spent a week in southwest England, with my car. Upon arrival, driving on the left and passing on the right felt weird, but after a few minutes of practice on the highway, I was starting to get good driving sensations... then the weirdest thing happened: for a brief moment, I experienced the text on road signs and license plates as mirrored. My brain had gone overboard and flipped the whole scene :-). Then It quickly subsided and I went on to discover the fair weather of Cornwall.
I think that my consciousness (that perpetual “now” we’re trapped in) happens in my brain based on information about the past state of the world. I know it isn’t a perfect rendition (see illusions, hallucinations, cognitive biases and other brain farts). I totally go by Anais Nin’s “We don’t see the word as it is, we see the world as we are”.
I know it has anything to do with the rest of the world through the impact of my actions.
The closest we will ever come to describing consciousness is simply describing the correlates of consciousness. The "ultimate cause" of it will forever be a mystery, behind the veil.
Consciousness appears to exist outside of the physical world, in that we can describe a physical process entirely without invoking consciousness. Because of this, consciousness is beyond the scientific method and our fundamental understanding in principle, not just in practice.
This is why it is called the "hard problem" of consciousness. In principle, there is no framework of deduction or reasoning by which we can explain the emergence of qualia.
>Consciousness appears to exist outside of the physical world, in that we can describe a physical process entirely without invoking consciousness.
Only in the same ways that e.g. emotions exist 'outside of the physical world' and we are doing some work with those (e.g. we know more about the effects of hormones on them now).
I completely disagree that this is unstudiable or 'behind the veil'. We can create beings with consciousness (babies) using a purely physical process, of course there is some way to learn more.
Personally, I assume the main problem is (as it so often happens) that 'consciousness' is too loosely defined and explaining it will be easier with more strict definitions and a deeper understanding of the brain and body.
The non-materialist argument is similar to creationist critiques of evolution. Scientists who study these things see a material explanation, but because these are enormously complex emergent properties they don't know the exact details. Critics then use a god of the gaps argument, saying that if a material explanation can't explain everything right now then a supernatural explanation (which which explains far less and runs counter to available evidence) should be favored. Behind both arguments lie an unease that the scientific approach knocks humans off their pedestal and makes them seem like everything else.
It's not surprising that the only neuroscientist in the article is arguing for a materialist approach.
I think you miss the point of the hard problem of consciousness.
No one is capable of offering any physical sort of coherent explanation for the experience of consciousness.
There is no process in the brain that, if discovered, would lead to an "aha!" moment about the source of qualia. We could understand the physical law governing every single atom in the brain and simulate it with the best achievable accuracy and still not understand anything more about the emergence of qualia than we do now.
Similarly, there is no coherent metaphysical or mystical explanation for consciousness. Such an explanation would have to invoke some interaction between a non physical world and the physical world, which is an absurd notion for multiple reasons.
I believe consciousness for humans is the equivalent of differential equations for amoeba. It is beyond our comprehension.
I don't think trying to solve it materialistically will work, because the moment we come up with an empirical measurement of consciousness, David Chalmers will crash in through a window and say "ah, now consider a hypothetical class of people for whom this measurement indicates consciousness, but who do not in fact experience qualia - we could call these qualia zombies, or Q-zombies for short."
Maybe the correct response is just to dismiss zombie theories as incoherent. But people are already doing that - I doubt collecting more physical evidence and improving our understanding of cognition will strengthen the case against P-zombies, even though it'd be useful knowledge for other reasons.
Qualia is not a scientific concept and really needs to be dismissed. (By definition it cannot be measured or observed.) I doubt you agree, but any study of consciousness that has a chance of succeeding will need to be extremely rigorous. I believe that an explanation of consciousness - much like the theory of evolution - will be both very simple and very unpopular.
I would agree with you if it weren't for these darn images and sounds and thoughts that flood my mind every time I wake up from the un-consciousness of sleep.
It seems to me that you're recognizing the impossibility of scientific study of qualia itself (rather than correlates of it) but you are then taking the radical step of dismissing it simply because it cannot be studied scientifically. That's where we differ.
> every time I wake up from the un-consciousness of sleep.
Do you not dream when you sleep (I mean, when you enter REM state)?
I know there are people who don't - but most of us I believe do dream (and some of us can become "conscious" of being in the dream state, while continuing to dream - aka, so-called "lucid dreaming").
I'm not a researcher or anything in regards to consciousness - but I wonder if there is anything that study of people who dream vs those who don't can tell us about it?
I wouldn't say that it is 'beyond us' so much as it is simply unexplainable by empirical models of reality. Empiricism is a bit like Newtonian gravitation, it isn't wrong but it isn't complete either. It's currently the predominant philosophical model human society as a whole, but it wasn't always so and there's no reason to expect it always will be.
See, this seems entirely obvious to me but so many people are stuck with a 100% materialism worldview that they expect their to be some scientific "explanation" for consciousness. And that truly baffles me.
A materialistic approach to explaining consciousness is necessary, since consciousness can be affected by physical changes to the brain, which implies that consciousness is fundamentally a physical process.
I'm of two minds about this (ha). One nods and says "yup, 'nuff said". The other thinks about a radio. A sufficiently complex radio can do amazing things... provided it has a signal. It can make music sounds boring and flat, or it can bring it to life (via an equalizer function). But if you mess with the antenna in any way, or, for that matter, disconnect it fully, the entire experience can be altered in significant ways. So, yeah, part of the physical matter was changed. But the original signal, already produced by some other process, "somewhere else", was never changed. I'm not necessarily advocating that our consciousness is generated somewhere else. It just makes me wonder (ha).
After having read my own comment again I felt like some clarification is necessary, even if just for myself.
In my little thought experiment the radio itself was never physically changed, just the antenna. The antenna, another physical component, is just a sensing peripheral. But what does the radio process if its front end is dead?
Think about Helen Keller for a minute. What kinds of sensing signals did she process? Vastly different than most of us. Yet she was still able to arrive at a roughly equivalent understanding of our overall shared experience. I say roughly equivalent because I have no idea what her internal state looks, or functions, like.
I think about this often. I myself have a drive to try to electronically capture, and share, knowledge. But I play a little thought experiment in my head often... what if all your senses were cut off and you were locked in. Just you inside your head, nothing else. Forgetting important factors like if you were just born or right now in your current state... what if a dry, textual, fact were somehow delivered straight to your consciousness. Something you know nothing about, nor have ever experienced before in any setting. Let's say you've never experienced snow, you don't even know what it is. Maybe you've only ever lived in a hot desert your whole life and have never experienced freezing cold, in any form (no AC, ice, etc...). So a textual description of snow is made available to your (locked-in) consciousness. You have no idea how to process that fact into an experience. I like to think of it like IBM's Watson. It has access to a wealth of facts. But it has nearly zero experience with any of them. You can not experience that dry textual fact without previous experience. In this case precipitation and/or freezing cold. I don't even think it's about context so much. Let's say you are provided with context about precipitation and freezing cold. It still doesn't provide the experience, memory, of either. You're consciousness is missing the essential primitives necessary for understanding the experience. I guess for me it's always come back to the experience. Watson can provide information. But it can't truly communicate a shared experience with that information to another consciousness, regardless of whether or not that other consciousness has experienced those primitives or not.
More simply, think about the first Matrix movie (insert groan here). Trinity downloads how to fly a helicopter. Let's say I want to invent that type of technology. My first attempt may be to create a system where you simply attach a cell phone to your head and have a way of conveying textual facts to your eyes. Dry facts about flying a helicopter. One field test is done with someone who has zero experience with flying at all. It will likely fail to produce the intended result. Sure it may provide a liftoff. But you will not be an instant stunt flyer. So iteration number two involves simple non-interactive, non-motion graphics. Another field test is done, on a new subject with no experience. Maybe somewhat better results, but still not the intended outcome. Next iteration involves videos. Another field test, again only somewhat improved results. You can iterate all the way through a short interactive simulation. The results will be better, for sure. But until you've had actual time in the field before-hand, i.e., experience, you just don't know the experience.
Read the definition of gravity. Huh!? Drop an apple, oh!
So what would it take here? Implanted memories? Along with all the necessary primitives??? I don't have the answer.
Let me turn that question on its head and ask you why should it be sufficient? Just because it interacts with matter doesn't mean we default to assuming a materialistic approach is sufficient.
I can't get bogged down with arguing why it seems obvious to me that it isn't sufficient. As I wrote earlier, it still boggles my mind that people think otherwise.
> why should it be sufficient? Just because it interacts with matter...
Because causal closure is a feature of our physical theories that have immense explanatory and predictive power. This is good reason to think that anything that interacts with the physical is also physical or supervenes on the physical.
Given the lack of explanatory power physical theories have so far provided for consciousness, I think it is fair on that alone to be agnostic about the claim consciousness is purely explained by physical attributes.
I think that's fair. But in terms of where a potential investigator should focus their attention, i.e. attempt to develop a physicalist theory or explore other options, I think the totality of evidence points towards a physicalist theory being more likely.
FWIW, I believe your stance is the one that requires justification. After all, you seem to be positing (although it’s hard to tell, since you’re not committing to anything specific) that the default assumption about a phenomena we observe which takes place in a universe which otherwise follows the laws of physics, is that the phenomena is somehow not explainable using the laws of physics.
physics is incomplete. It was niels bohr who said, “Physics is to be regarded not so much as the study of something a priori given, but rather as the development of methods of ordering and surveying human experience.” without including psi and cogent six sigma data from consciousness studies it is not complete, nor can it pancomputationally bc of godel. not to mention exceptional human experiences like OOBE and cosmic consciousness. mass and energy make up 5% of the observable universe. to account for the rest with massless particles and dimensionless points and other made up stuff shows the inherent contradiction and metaphysical bias of materialistic monism philosophically. ironic that the big bang is something from -nothing- which makes no sense: there is no such thing as absolute nothingness and the first receptor had to be nonphysical. see vernon neppe and ed close on iqnexus, reality begins with consciousness on brainvoyage, and interviews on new thinking allowed. also see bernardo kastrups works for a computer scientists arguments for idealism in the context of many scientific experiments and the loss of local realism.
I was just reading through this sub thread and I agree. I immediately started comparing the statements against Russell's Teapot ("...can't get bogged down...") and God of the Gaps ("...lack of explanatory power physical theories...") type issues.
When I say can't get bogged down I mean I don't have the energy to get into a big long discussion.
You baited me into starting one... but I'll be brief. The sensation of seeing blue is clearly, to me, unrelated to the material aspects of blue light or the interaction of that light on the cells in my retina, or the electric signals of neurons in my brain. I could imagine myself as the same person except for the perception of two colors swapped. All this is summarized in the question, "What canvas does the brain's neurons draw its images on?" I can't imagine any answer that is material.
Also, saying that physical theories lack explanatory power is not the same thing as saying there is NOTHING can offer explanatory power, or even that physical theories cannot augment any theories. But I strongly oppose the blind optimism of those believing pure physical theories will explain consciousness when it is has so far failed abysmally. That is not the same thing as saying no such physical theories exist, but that I wish more people realized just how optimistic they sound without real reason to be.
Glad to have pulled you back in, however unwillingly. =) It's an interesting topic to kick around.
On the first, could we not say the same about how an image is rasterized from a set of points, to a polygon, to a shape, to a set of pixels displaying the images on your very screen? Before it was displayed, way down the stack, it was just a series of switches being turned off and on. Electrical impulses that viewed from an ignorant outside source would just appear as random noise. And yet we can easily ascribe the material manner in which it made its way from one to the other. Just because we currently can't directly encode\decode the exact means in which the mind creates these scenes, it's not hard at all to build mental models that a network of synapses could be responsible for a very similar thing from my perspective.
Also decoupling 'blue' from it's physical properties would inherently remove any relevance of the color between us. I agree with and also wonder do two people see 'blue' as the same color sensation, but the only means we have to compare that experience between two separate minds is both looking at a light source in the 450nm spectrum. We have no means to convey the experience itself, only the relation of understanding any further experiences with the first. I'm not sure that it matters much though. Another computer analogy, although Linux and Windows differ a good bit on how they would internally configure a PDF document to be displayed on the screen from it's initial bits, the end result should be close enough that we can both agree on the information the screen displays.
On the second, I'd stand beside my original complaint. This to me draws from the God of the Gaps issues, that somehow if the way we've described the world in every other recognized way is unable to put forward a valid reasoning for a phenomenon with our current level of understanding, we should instead ascribe a non material or physical level of power to explain it that has never been shown or proven to offer a provable valid reasoning for anything. That to me sounds rather optimistic.
> The sensation of seeing blue is clearly, to me, unrelated to the material aspects of blue light or the interaction of that light on the cells in my retina, or the electric signals of neurons in my brain.
Why is it your assumption that the sensation of seeing something is anything other than simply the network of neurons in one part of your brain firing in concert in response to visual stimuli? Why is the color purple, which is a mix of blue and red, also perceived as an intermediate between blue and red if the sensation of seeing a color is not linked to it's actual, physical properties and how they interact with your visual sense organs?
How so? Somewhere between conception and birth consciousness arises. Gametes are clearly not conscious as far as we can tell, and yet a baby is. So somewhere in the physical development that happens in between, consciousness arises as a result. The exact point is a topic of much debate.
Somewhere between mortal injury and decomposition, consciousness vanishes. Live humans, yet to succumb to a mortal wound, are clearly still conscious, yet a decomposed corpse is clearly not. So somewhere in between, consciousness ceases to be. We don't know yet exactly when, but I'd while say we've got it pretty narrowed down, the exact point currently a topic of debate in relation to organ donation.
This is all to say nothing of the how of consciousness, or what happens in between, but it's pretty clear there is a beginning and an end to it.
These are pretty basic observations that anyone can make. As for any presence of "consciousness" before or after these points, well, what evidence is there? None I've ever seen, just conjecture and speculation presented as fact.
if consciousness was created by physical processes, what created the first consciousness? consciousness has always been and will always be, the physical realm is just a play of form, temporary and changing and your identity on this earth is also a temporary form that ostensibly begins at conception but is actually is process that goes back to the origins of the universe and beyond the physical realm, to a supreme intelligence and consciousness that is behind everything.
> if consciousness was created by physical processes, what created the first consciousness?
Perhaps a different physical process, since we can see that a physical process is capable of creating consciousness. It seems very plausible that consciousness is simply an emergent property of complex, multi-cellular life. If so, then a better question isn't what created the first consciousness, but what created life? But that's a whole different can of worms. I'm afraid we may not be very special at all, just clusters of animated molecules that last a short while before entropy catches up to us and we revert to dust. But I understand why this scares some and they seek comfort in other explanations.
> supreme intelligence and consciousness that is behind everything
i've experienced it, and so can you. don't take my word for it. invest serious time in meditation and if you want a shortcut, drink ayahuasca or consume 5meo-dmt.
it is just as scary to realise that your ultimate identity is God (with all the responsibility that entails - full responsibility for your own life and your environment etc), that you are fundamentally alone (we are all the same consciousness experiencing itself from different perspectives) and eternal with no respite of death. you are kidding yourself if you think your life is an accident. you are alive because you desired to be. it is your deepest desires that drive your incarnation into each life.
you were conscious before your life and you will be after it. it may be a different type of consciousness and not attached to your ego or current identity, but you will always have consciousness.
if you are a materialist, you will never be able to explain the origin of anything as there will always be a level before. consciousness needs no beginning, it has always been and will always be, your true identity is God and you (not your current identity/ego) are immortal.
You're not describing consciousness - you're trying to hide spirituality and religion in scientific terms, and making utterly unverifiable claims from nothing. This is what you'd like, but not what you have any evidence for. If you're going to make that sort of claim, call it spirit, or soul, but consciousness is a clearly defined concept that you have to actually break the definition of in order to make these claims - how can we have consciousness that we aren't aware of, when that is literally what consciousness is, awareness?
you can become aware of it, just meditate or consume 5meo-dmt. preferably do both. personally i drank copious amounts of ayahuasca and meditated. i also trained at a buddhist campus and meditated 16 hours a day for a year. you can become aware of these things but don't take my word for it, do the self inquiry yourself, all of the answers are within.
The very fact that a physical substance can affect your consciousness tells us it isn't eternal or fundamental - you can literally change how your perceive it with drugs.
psychedelics are a shortcut for those who don't want to spend time meditating, you can achieve the same result without drugs. it's difficult to convince somebody who hasn't had the experience and of course if you'd had the experience you wouldn't need convincing but i'd suggest you stay open minded and at least try to explore these things when the time is right. and if you won't, it's alright, you'll remember everything once you die
> and if you won't, it's alright, you'll remember everything once you die
Just like we remember everything from before we're born? Or will we get all that back once we die as well? Why do we lose it all in the middle? What a series of empty, meaningless, unverifiable claims.
This is all just drug-fueled pseudo-spiritualism brought on by hallucinations.
Also anesthesia. The few times I've been under it I can definitively say I wasn't conscious - it was a light switch being flipped. I existed, I ceased, I resumed. No passage of time, no half-remembered dreams, nothing in the middle at all. An entirely chemically induced unconscious state.
what you are able to do in your body is affected by your brain, even what you are able to calculate. consciousness has a far greater scope than human abilities.
consciousness disembodied is still intelligent and aware but becomes infinite, undifferentiated, whole.
psychedelics and meditation will get you there, just put in the effort to do the self inquiry. with some persistence and courage, you'll experience it first hand.
Even though your brain thought it wasn't, you were still embodied, unless you are telling us you were in fact medically dead and still self aware.
Unless you can actually tell someone what's in the next room without ever physically being there or observing it, you're just imagining things. It would be incredibly easy to test in a double blind manner, so if it was a power that someone could actually manifest it'd be reliably demonstrated by now.
I tend to think the same. But then I always question whether I just lack imagination in how to formulate the problem scientifically. Because it does feel a bit like an excuse.
I'll bite. I'd take a body running a simulation of the environment to compare possible outcomes of its actions. At some point along the path driven by evolution the body manages to put himself into the simulation provoking a whole spectrum of interesting effects keeping this in sync.
I don't know how to quote your post, so forgive me if I'm doing it wrong...
> The closest we will ever come to describing consciousness is simply describing the correlates of consciousness. The "ultimate cause" of it will forever be a mystery, behind the veil.
I don't agree about it being forever a mystery.
> Consciousness appears to exist outside of the physical world, in that we can describe a physical process entirely without invoking consciousness. Because of this, consciousness is beyond the scientific method and our fundamental understanding in principle, not just in practice.
I do like to think about this. A lot. I compare it to the experience of using a computer. Turn it on and supply it with an operating system and all of the sudden there is a "there" there, even thI don't know how to quote your post, so forgive me if I'm doing it wrong...
> The closest we will ever come to describing consciousness is simply describing the correlates of consciousness. The "ultimate cause" of it will forever be a mystery, behind the veil.
I don't agree about it being forever a mystery.
> Consciousness appears to exist outside of the physical world, in that we can describe a physical process entirely without invoking consciousness. Because of this, consciousness is beyond the scientific method and our fundamental understanding in principle, not just in practice.
I do like to think about this. A lot. I compare it to the experience of using a computer. Turn it on and supply it with an operating system and all of the sudden there is a "there" there, even though physically there is not. I'm not an OS person, kernel-wise, and I've not had any conversations with them on this topic. But I imagine them to be too close to the topic... unable to see the forest through the trees. Take a step back and look at it. Amazing things can happen in a place that is not physically there. Maybe looking at the 80x25 isn't so spectacular (although I am a CLI guy at heart), but think about VR. There is certainly a there there. Simulated, sure, but it exists nowhere in the physical world.
To me, that scenario is something akin to, but certainly not the equivalent of, consciousness. That scenario is caused by electronics... chips and electricity. Physically damage the chips or turn off the electricity and it certainly changes, or even disappears. Yet, that simulation isn't physically extant.
ough physically there is not. I'm not an OS person, kernel-wise, and I've not had any conversations with them on this topic. But I imagine them to be too close to the topic... unable to see the forest through the trees. Take a step back and look at it. Amazing things can happen in a place that is not physically there. Maybe looking at the 80x25 isn't so spectacular (although I am a CLI guy at heart), but think about VR. There is certainly a there there. Simulated, sure, but it exists nowhere in the physical world.
To me, that scenario is something akin to, but certainly not the equivalent of, consciousness. That scenario is caused by electronics... chips and electricity. Physically damage the chips or turn off the electricity and it certainly changes, or even disappears. Yet, that simulation isn't physically extant.
"It's very hard to change people's minds about something like consciousness, and I finally figured out the reason for that. The reason for that is that everybody's an expert on consciousness. (...) With regard to consciousness, people seem to think, each of us seems to think, "I am an expert. Simply by being conscious, I know all about this." And so, you tell them your theory and they say, "No, no, that's not the way consciousness is! No, you've got it all wrong." And they say this with an amazing confidence."
"A lot of people are just left completely dissatisfied and incredulous when I attempt to explain consciousness. So this is the problem. So I have to do a little bit of the sort of work that a lot of you won't like, for the same reason that you don't like to see a magic trick explained to you. How many of you here, if somebody -- some smart aleck -- starts telling you how a particular magic trick is done, you sort of want to block your ears and say, "No, no, I don't want to know! Don't take the thrill of it away. I'd rather be mystified. Don't tell me the answer." A lot of people feel that way about consciousness."
I think this is why the Socratic method is so effective. When Socrates would debate with someone, he would almost never just state claims as if he knew the answers. Rather, he would always act as if his audience was the expert and he himself knew nothing. Acting in that way, he would probe the audience. Invariably, the audience would begin answering questions as if they knew all the answers; and invariably, Socrates would lead them around until they tripped over their own feet and realized they didn't know what they were talking about.
On reading what was then the top comment on this article, I saw that it asserted as undeniably true a highly debatable proposition. I was about to reply, when I saw that the second did the same. The third was more of an aphorism that looked profound until you thought about it... There do seem to be a lot of people who want our consciousness to remain a mystery. I guess that it is vitalism's last stand.
FWIW, I think there is a 'hard problem' (more than one, in fact), but not the one Chalmers identifies; perhaps the hardest is 'how come we (think we) have free will?'
That’s easier than you think: what those who use that term for discussions understand that term to mean is mostly based on work made by religious apologists through the centuries. So the answer to “how come” is “to somehow excuse the concept of having all-mighty all-knowing god while people still do whatever.” Thus so constructed “free will” is the limit over which that all mighty can’t cross. That’s why it’s so emotionally defended.
We have had some success in understanding all sorts of phenomena that are too complex to explain in all their detail: we have a useful understanding of the meteorology of snowstorms, for example, even though we cannot give an accounting for the exact shape of every single snowflake. You have given us no reason to be sure that an understanding of this form cannot be achieved for consciousness.
To anticipate one possible reply: self-referentiality (our mind studying itself) is not self-evidently a barrier, as one mind can study another.
> That's easy to disprove. A calculator isn't sophisticated enough to simulate itself, but a modern computer can perfectly simulate itself.
What you say is pretty obviously false: a computer with finite memory cannot simulate itself in a general case because that would require more memory than it actually has or a compression algorithm that's effective on random data, because its memory would need to contain the emulation program plus a full memory image. Computers with infinite memory do not exist and random data is not compressible, therefore modern computers cannot perfectly simulate themselves. QED.
Because memory can be filled with random data, so that's a case that needs to be handled if a computer is to "perfectly simulate itself."
>> That's easy to disprove. A calculator isn't sophisticated enough to simulate itself, but a modern computer can perfectly simulate itself.
> Today we can run entire Linux in a web page and we can surely run a simulation of IBM PC.
You said "a modern computer can perfectly simulate itself." If you think "running Linux in a web page" is an example of that, I don't think you understood your initial statement. A modern computer can simulate a less-capable version of itself, but it cannot "perfectly simulate itself," as I showed in my comment.
It's not a good look to come in with an "easy disproof" that itself contains a pretty obvious falsehood. Also I'd wager your implicit statement that the OP's "to understand" is encompassed by your "to simulate" would be generally considered pretty controversial, at a minimum.
This is one of the many reasons why I love science fiction. Many of my favorite novels center around consciousness and the related technology to assist/enable/enhance it. Reading these in my younger years, many of these novels have shaped my life, especially my career.
I may be confusing my authors, but some of the more recent novels I've read (from about 10 years or so ago, it's been a while), I think from Alastair Reynolds, have a wide range of ideas. Some center around the same kind of thing that Elon Musk talks about with Neuralink. Others take a wildly different path... putting an extant brain in a box or cabinet on wheels.
On this topic I used to be a huge fan of the concept of uploading. But then I formed the opinion that, if all we're doing is copying state, then the new instance is not the old inshttp://www.rudyrucker.com/wares/tance. It's just another instance with its own state from that point forward. I think it's also a Reynolds book where a person creates a copy of their consciousness and puts it into a very physically small spacecraft in order to travel a maximum speed to a very distance place (I forget the intended task). But upon return the two instances and ended up becoming antagonists due to their different experiences in the meantime.
Likewise, I want to say it was a Rucker book, a person is copied, and the copy is not them, just a new instance.
That kind of soured me on uploading. However, at the same time, it seems to me that can be akin to giving birth to the next generation. A gift of sorts. Maybe we ourselves can not directly enjoy the benefits, but possibly we can gift that possibility to our descendants.
I am particularly fond of old cyberpunk takes on this topic. Gibson and his wild cyberspace characters... the Oracle and Papa Legba, the self-aware pimpmobile, and the end of the one book where entities jumped out of all the fax machines around the world... good times.
What if it were possible to probe a single neuron and copy its exact functioning - that is, the actual neuron and the artificial copy both act the same to the same inputs, and produce the same outputs. Not only that, but this artificial neuron, once fully copied and functioning, could then be inserted in parallel with the original. Then - kill the original.
So there's now this artificial neuron (it doesn't have to be inside the actual brain, either!) working exactly like the original. In fact, let's say this artificial neuron does exist outside the natural brain (and let's ignore any propagation delays or whatnot, though in reality, anything we did with electronics would be vastly faster than actual neuronal signal speeds).
So - we have "copied" (or "uploaded" if simulated with software) a neuron from the brain to a new place outside of that brain.
From the brain's perspective - everything is the same.
Do it over and over and over again - until all the neurons are copied from brain to outside of it.
Again - from the brain's perspective, everything is the same - but now it is completely artificial - and may even be running as a simulation in some fashion.
Now - we did this "one neuron at a time" - but how is that fundamentally different than if we could (somehow) make a copy "all at once in parallel" (something similar to the transporter of Star Trek) - then killed the original?
Of course - if that copy and the original existed and were aware at the same time - their experiences would diverge - but what if the copy was instead "wired" to the same inputs and such (that is, in parallel) to the original brain. In short, kinda like the original way we were copying and killing neurons, but this time, instead of killing the neurons (again, wired in parallel), we let them live, then killed them all at once at the end.
Since both sets are receiving the same inputs and producing the same outputs - where is the "being" or the "consciousness" at? Is it only in the natural brain - or in the artificial? Both at the same time? If we killed one, but not the other - where is the being now? Does it matter which we kill?
We could do the opposite - kill off one of the artificial neurons - and the being should still be ok, right? But what if we randomly selected which we killed - artificial one time, natural another - but since they are all wired together in the same manner and were operating in the same manner in parallel - now where is the "being"?
So - does it matter if we kill off the natural neurons in serial vs parallel? Furthermore, assuming everything is wired together in parallel - would copying everything, then killing off the natural side matter? At what point and "how" does the "being" transfer from one side to the other? Furthermore, how fast must the natural side be killed or shut off - and if there is a disconnect between the two sides - does that matter? Like - if the natural side is disconnected from the copy then a nanosecond later is killed - is the being now still in the artificial copy? What does the being experience in all of this?
The funny thing is - something like this already happens - naturally - to our bodies every day and over time. But we retain the concept of "self" and "being". But it happens slowly, and it doesn't happen "all at once" - a copy isn't made and then the original killed off, but rather cells die and are replaced (maybe not perfectly - leading to aging, disease, and possibly death) over the course of time - but by the above thought experiments - does that really matter, especially if it were done quick enough?
Like - imagine a single brain - but connected to two separate but identical bodies. When one blinks, the other blinks as well. Sever the connection with one of the bodies - the being in the brain should "go" with the body still connected, right? So if there are two brains, connected to the same body - and they are both operating in identical fashion - where is the being? Which brain? Both?
Again - this is all a thought experiment - which has been explored in depth by many people for quite a long while. It has been explored by science fiction several times. In both thought arenas, different conclusions have been made over what really happens - or might happen. But really, no one can say to know the answer.
There is also an unending quest to explain foobar. Hard to explain something that's not defined. We can still talk about what meaning we put into this term. My favorite analogy is the flow of electrons in a processor chip is its consciousness and the algorithm it's performing is its cognition. Using this analogy, consciousness is the process that updates our world, i.e. the process that makes a photon move forward, while cognition is the logical interpretation of these updates.
Author claims to "have been reading around in the field of consciousness studies for over two decades" + doesn't mention neither Giulio Tononi nor Karl Friston => comes of as kind of clueless ?
It is indeed unending, no end in sight. This should signal that there is something fundamentally wrong with Western thinking that leaves it incapable to even begin to grapple with the question.
Some "reputable" philosophers even deny that consciousness exists.
Anyway, here is the answer. 3 minutes and you can move on and think about more productive things.
The existence of the world, and of myself as a subjective being, are beyond reason. Understanding how either work provided they exist isn’t a priori unsolvable.
A core challenge is to grasp your own subjectivity/qualia/mind. If you can grasp it then you can write it down in some form. But the tough part is that "grasping" is a thought production. So how can a specific thought production represent the whole functioning of thought? And if it's not a thought production how can it be 'understanding'? This is where the mystics come in, who present us with a different definition of "understanding" which doesn't involve thought productions, as in an intuitive "getting it". That may well be, but it's useless for science and engineering.
So I think we're limited to speculation, which may well be fine.
Any adequate description of consciousness will break down in to "does this thing have an internal life of the mind, a subjective experience of reality, so to speak, or is it merely an extremely convincing automaton?"
Of course, this applies to other people too if you want to be solipsistic about it.
> Any adequate description of consciousness will break down in to "does this thing have an internal life of the mind, a subjective experience of reality, so to speak, or is it merely an extremely convincing automaton?"
Not so. Not all theories of consciousness allow for the existence of 'p-zombies'.
Without dualism what is a p-zombie? Anything that related external events to an internal state that contained a model of self would be conscious. Where would there be a line between fake and real even if artificial?
Something that blows my mind: we can use our understanding of physics and math to predict the trajectory of a rocket to the moon without actually going there..
But we can’t predict what new color we’d get by mixing two colors. We just have to mix them to find out.
> But we can’t predict what new color we’d get by mixing two colors.
Can you elaborate more on this point? Links as to why this is impossible would be appreciated. If paint absorbs certain wavelengths while reflecting others (which are the perceived color), wouldn't the mixture of two colors absorb two subsets of the spectrum, and reflect everything else? And if so, why can't it be simulated?
I guess OP refers to the fact that even full knowledge of the visible spectrum cannot tell you how you will perceive the color through your three-dimensional perception system and the brain processor.
That makes sense. But thinking about OP's analogy, the information of a simulated trajectory of a rocket to the moon would also need to be delivered through a 2D monitor with finite resolution/framerate.
Simulations will always be as good as our computing power gets, and the results will be "understood" as good as our perception gets. So, in some sense, both scenarios are the same.
There have been individuals who understood consciousness for thousands of years, one pops up every so often like in "The Matrix" but to have this person try to explain it to the masses is casting pearls before swine.
You're talking about the very design of reality, of course the explanation is going to be a little more radical than you're prepared for in your everyday ego-driven state of mind.
I think this is a good question. Though we have some tools.
Did you ever faint? I did, definitely wasn’t conscious. Or whenever they dozed me under in thr hospital, not conscious.
In parts of my sleep, I’m not conscious. I now know this because recently my tinnitus became worse and I now here it in my dreams, based on the sound and frequency, I can infer time because of it (my tinnitus, although annoying has a regular multiphonic modulated sine wave quality to it, I could recreate it on a synthesizer, it’s quite beautiful but not 24/7). Also since it is a new development I get really conscious when I hear my tinnitus while I dream. I am conscious for 10 minutes per night.
This has only lasted 3 nights so far, so not much data.
Whenever my dreams do not have tinnitus, I am less conscious. I also notice this in dreams by my tinnitus ebbing away and me losing consciousness. There’s a similar process of losing some consciousness when I become too stoned.
Based on my experience, memory is a crucial part for my conscious experience.
> There’s a similar process of losing some consciousness when I become too stoned
Hey could you please check https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypnagogia and tell me if this is this is similar to the too stoned/not sleeping state (except the paralysis, I assume you can move with enough willpower)? Did you ever take psychedelics? What's your meditation experience?
Then we can apply that definition to all sorts of awkward and upsetting cases like "person in dissociative state", "person with plural-psyche", "person in persistent vegetative state", "newborn baby", etc.
I find it reasonable to assume that for thought processes to occur, there must be some processing, so rocks are out.
A more interesting example would be, say, trees, which do communicate with each other to some degree. Is that accompanied by some form of awareness? What's the lower bound of complexity at which consciousness kicks in? What about supraorganisms such as insect hives? Human cities? An ecosystem as a whole?
1. According to materialism, consciousness is purely a result of physical processes.
2. Our consciousness is complex.
3. Therefore, materialism says that any physical entity with a complexity comparable to us is probably conscious.
At best, going from the two premises to the conclusion involves a tendentious and useless definition of 'consciousness' that equivocates over the specific features of the consciousness of genus Homo that make it distinctly interesting. Tononi's IIT makes the same mistake.
Firstly, consciousness is probably not well-modeled as arbitrary complexity plus X, as the complexity is likely inherent to X, and have a quite specific form. For example, it seems unlikely, on basic information-theoretic grounds, that the notoriously complex turbulent flow of a fluid in a pipe is materially closer to consciousness than laminar flow in that pipe.
Secondly, the burden of proof (or just of showing evidence) rests squarely on the person making the claim that the United States probably has it (whatever 'it' happens to be.) It is hard to do that whan you cannot say, with any specificity at all, what X is.
If your latest post is intended to be a defense of Schwitzgebel's paper, I think you are missing his point. I think he regards the consciousness of the United States counterfactually, and is attempting to show that materialism leads to an implausible conclusion, but he fails to do so, partly on account of the problem I raised in my original post.
> What's the lower bound of complexity at which consciousness kicks in? What about supraorganisms such as insect hives? Human cities? An ecosystem as a whole?
There's also the question of the nodes and edges of the graph; does the complexity (or processing capability) of these have any effect on the complexity bounds?
That is - compare a neuron as the node (and the dendrites as the "edges") in the larger graph of the neural network that is the human brain. Each node and edge are relatively simple compared to the entire brain.
Now - what happens when that brain becomes the node (via a human) and the edges of the graph of interaction in society becomes the internet (social networking, email, etc)? Both are much more complex than the former - so do we need fewer nodes/edges to "kickstart consciousness"?
The problem of course is how can we (as individual nodes) perceive this consciousness? How could we ever query it? And - if we could query it - and it perceived us querying it - what would it do?
If for instance - you perceived one or more of your neurons suddenly say "Hey - I'm a neuron - can you talk to me? I want to know what you are thinking? Helloooo?" - what would you do?
Well - more than a few of us would probably head to the doctor in an attempt to either shut that neuron up or remove it or kill it or...you get the idea.
Information could be encoded in molecule oscillations and therefore 2 rocks of different temperatures would communicate it when touching (heat transfer would occur). Can this be considered processing?
It's doubtful you'll be able to make such a scheme work: Information processing tends to involve storage and retrieval of data. That's not really possible in the thermodynamic regime. You'd have to do all your processing before the information gets lost to thermalization.
Image recognition needs no storage or retrieval of data: it's a single pass thru a series of matrix multiplications. Yet, image recognition is the very definition of data processing.
Heat is entropy, but entropy is basically a measure of disorder/randomness. So when two substances transfer heat, they necessarily are not communicating information, except perhaps that there exists a temperature differential.
That's circular logic with a dubious interpretation of quantum physics. The idea that consciousness could somehow be the cause of the collapse of the wave function is anthropocentrism and shows a poor understanding of what measurement is.
>How do you set the bounds of a conscious entity though?
Honestly, I believe there is a closed system inside us that is kept "alive" by bodily functions and kept safe from decoherence - somehow. I can't explain why. Some claim it's inside microtubules, but I'm currently lacking knowledge in biology/physics combo to trust the papers enough without diving more into the matter.
The concept itself does make sense and it's been a point of discussion of many physicists, I'd refer you too look at quantum consciousness theories, there are a few familiar names there that suggest it and the explanations will be far more detailed and accurate then I can provide. I'd say that the ability to influence a wave collapse is "free will" and it's related to intelligence, consciousness of the subject and current state of mind/body. And I'd say it's distributed, so even tho one might have a strong pull on the wave, the decision is ultimately made by summing the vectors of all beings focused on that particular result.
>How would it explain the persistance of identity across lapses of consciousness?
Now, that's a good question - especially if someone is 100% completely dead and comes back to life. I'd say your "soul/consciousness" know wheres to return when you lapse but on one hand, that's astral mumbo jumbo. Possibly brain patterns? My theory is that when you're born, the soul comes in and is "hashed" by current state of the universe (check out Jyotish, I know it's astrology but damn that shit got me wondering a lot of times), this effects your brain patterns and it keeps this unique "hash" until you die, then the next life is your soul being rehashed again (so karma still applies, hashes change but they're like a blockchain let's say - the next one is the result of the previous ones and their work).
So I'd say that activating the human body - biologically bringing it back to "conscious" state - starts a process that creates specific patterns which match the signature of your current conscious soul (consciousness, whatever) and entangles them. Complete comeback of someone who is really dead isn't possible because the system is so damaged and you cannot activate it to create that pattern again (could possibly be linked to DMT being released/bound and activated, which opens a port for your consciousness to detach.
Tried to keep it as short and understandable, so sorry about the non-scientific mumbo jumbo, but it provides great metaphors and shortens my thoughts - and I assume a lot of it is true, but boilerplated and snake oiled for generic masses.
Not sure its hard to come up with a definition that does that. eg consciousness is awareness of stuff as in the internal state changing in a way that corresponds. So when humans see stuff you get neurons firing, with the rock less so. A problem is everyone has different definitions though.
How do you know that the rock is not aware of stuff? if you say consciousness is just neurons firing in certain patterns you have also given an answer to the traditional "hard" problem of consciousness, with hundreds of pages of philosophical thought that refutes your answer.
Don't underestimate the complexity of a rock's internal state. There is a unfathomable number of atoms in complex crystal lattices in there. Defects in that lattice alone can encode a ton of information. Then you have a bunch of quantum state for each elementary particle. All of that reacts to external stimuli like temperature, pressure, or the occasional cosmic ray.
Thoughts are a process, so if they were supported by a crystal lattice, that lattice would have to go through changes.
As to your other point, the ergodicity of the system at the very least places a limit on the timescales over which consciousness may persist. I'm fairly confident in my belief that a rock cannot be conscious in any appreciable way.
You're right. The dividing line is whether or not you think the physical and the mental necessarily coincide, which is in principle an orthogonal issue.
I've recently been reading Galileo's Error by Philip Goff which covers a lot of this ground (he's a proponent of panpsychism). Quite an interesting look into the various arguments though I thought (I previously had no background in this type of thing).
There are theories that equate information processing (integration/differentiation) with consciousness.
It maps well with what happens in your brain, where too little or too much functional connectivity maps to loss of consciousness (think anesthesia and epilepsy).
Rocks also have complex internal structure that responds to external influence, e.g. atoms vibrating in their crystal lattices depending on heat and pressure. Maybe there is a Boltzmann consciousness inside the rock when you're picking it up. What is "information" and what is noise is a matter of interpretation.
Rocks have random structure, not complex structure. Randomness does not entail consciousness. A feature of consciousness is that it is informative: it informs you about the external state of the world or about internal processes. But a random configuration of molecules carry no information. (A random string is information but it doesn't carry information, i.e. mutual information with another structure.)
The last sentence sums it up: “if you simply rule in advance that the mind must be physical and assume that an understanding of consciousness must be a materialist understanding, because scientific materialism is obviously correct, you end up looking for your keys under the streetlamp because that’s where the light is.“
Irreducibility may be a thing, e.g. turbulence. For example, we can easily make an ML model that recognizes an image or speech and we can explain every little detail about how it works, but we can't explain the high level emergent dynamics of this model and thus can't really explain how it works. I believe we'll build a real AI soon, it'll exceed all expectations, and we still be puzzled by the complexity of it's turbulent emergent dynamics. In other words, if we could ask an oracle how cognition works, he would write a bunch of diff equations followed by a million volumes of hard math theorems and the complexity will be so irreducible that by the time we start reading volume 2, we'd forget volume 1. Yet another way to look at it. We can imagine a square because it's a simple object. However we can't imagine a 10 dimensional calabi yau manifold no matter how hard we try: it has more complexity that fits into our brains. If the theory behind cognition is as irreducible as that manifold, well never "get" it, even though we'll be able to describe all its local properties.
An interesting thing to me is the unending quest may somewhat end during our lifetimes through us being able to build conscious AI and see how it works.
I'm thinking along the lines of Feynman's "What I cannot create, I do not understand." If we can build machines with dreams, feelings and the like similar to human ones I imagine we'll have a better understanding of how the thing works. Bit like the difference between philosophers of old pondering how birds fly and how to define the word flying vs aircraft designers who build working aircraft and have degrees in aeronautical engineering.
Unfortunately I think this greatly underestimates the qualitative difference of the fundamental nature of the phenomenon of consciousness to anything we have modeled or built before.
Sure, we can and will build conscious machines (I believe), but we will do that modelling cognition - and yes, we will develop a better understanding of that.
But consciousness is very different and will come with the territory unbidden, and unexplained.
You could use an MRI machine to show that their brain activity is the same as yours, and if you know you are conscious then that should be evidence enough. Or you could just ask them.
I can easily make a computer program which, when asked "Are you conscious?", will reply with "Yes", but that doesn't mean that it is conscious. Conversely, you can ask someone who doesn't speak English, "Are you conscious?", and they will only stare at you confusedly, but that doesn't mean that they're not conscious.
Therefore, "just asking" is not a reliable method at all to find out whether an entity is conscious.
How could another human being be not-conscious while displaying all the signs of consciousness? Maybe I have a failure of imagination but if ask my mother "are you conscious?" and she says "yes" then that's pretty conclusive evidence to me. This is actually such a dumb thread I think I'm going to stop now.
It's not dumb, it's philosophy. Philosophy is applying logic to thought. We cannot physically interact with "consciousness", so instead we think about it, put forth ideas, and logically scrutinize those ideas.
If the answer to the question "are you concious?" is conclusive evidence, then evidently not all people are concious, because some will answer "no" to that question. Would you agree with this logic - this if-then statement?
If you are human, you are conscious. Consciousness is to humans in the same way breathing is to humans.
There are many other arguments that I'm sure you are aware of. If all of these aren't enough for you, well then, I would direct you towards exploring solipsism.
An MRI scan, while incredible technology, is an indirect measure of an indirect measure of brain activity, has several seconds delay and a spatial resolution of a couple of millimeters. The "same" brain activity in two mri scans to me doesn't approach the kind of evidence I would be looking for here.
This. If building a conscious machine was as simple as building a machine that looks conscious on MRI, then it would be as simple as tape-recording a human brain.
This brings up Ned Block's paper on the Harder Problem of Consciousness in which he uses the example of Data from Star Trek to demonstrate the epistemic bind we are in when trying to decide whether anything non-human is conscious. Another example would be a society of people (China for example). Do all their interactions result in consciousness? How would we every determine this?
The invention of conscious AI could spawn a whole civil rights movement. Is a computer capable of consciousness entitled to the same rights as a human?
Obviously this has already been pondered in depth by various sci-fi writers over the years, but it will be very interesting to see if it does happen in our lifetimes.
What if "a mere computer" ends up being superior to a human mind in every way? We may not believe it is concious, but we might end up believing that we ourselves are also not concious in the process.
Highly unlikely, as we are not nearer conscious machines now than we were 100 years ago. There is nothing about computers that make them more conscious than e.g. radiators.
There's also no reason to believe that our own "consciousness" is any more than a significantly advanced algorithm. It's a very human trait to put ourselves on a pedestal.
You'd need to rely on dualism/metaphysics to support the view that consciousness is just an algorithm. Without some medium to implement it, an algorithm is just an abstract idea. The implementation could in principle be arbitrary.
I belive consciousness can be explained within a monist, materialistic worldview. I see it as the result of a biological process, much like digestion. To stretch this analogy (perhaps a tad too far): You can simulate digestion on a computer but it will never produce a real shit for you.
I think John Searle got this right and can recommend his book The Mystery of Consciousness.
> I see it as the result of a biological process, much like digestion. To stretch this analogy (perhaps a tad too far): You can simulate digestion on a computer but it will never produce a real shit for you.
While not a simulation, but it is somewhat relevant:
Maybe not. To move to a situation where the self driving car is asking itself "I wonder if my experience of the red of a traffic light is the same as other self driving cars experience" you'd have to add language, thinking and feelings however I think even present cars are further down that road on the whole than radiators.
I think the best we can do is to build AI that is to us externally indistinguishable from consciousness, or "conscious enough." Which I think is totally doable. But that just represents what we know or recognize as conscious, which can be a very superficial understanding. If it looks like a duck...
Seen as we still can't even define and measure consciousness how do you think this is going to work exactly? AI is not some kind of magic box despite what a lot of "thought leaders" might lead you to think.
I'm not sure why you've been downvoted for this. The fact that our consciousness is nothing more than the emergent behaviour of various ongoing chemical and electrical processes doesn't sit well with some people, I guess. Personally I derive a lot of comfort from the fact that we aren't "special".
I use my consciousness to infer a physical reality, which I then use to further infer that consciousness doesn't actually exist. That doesn't strike me as great reasoning. Certainly far from "fact."
The locus of sensory perception is not in the brain, out-of-body experiences indicate that.
Thoughts are a kind of stuff different from the stuff that bodies are made of. They kind of hover around your head, and with practice, you can learn to see the thoughts around the heads of other people.
Emotion is again a third kind of stuff. Gurdjieff identified emotion with the "blood" of a kind of emotional "body" that was co-extensive with but not the same as the physical body.
This is basic, run=of-the-mill, kiddie-level metaphysics. The so-called "hard problem" of consciousness begins with the exclusion of all the relevant information.
Out-of-body experiences have failed to provide the person experiencing them with information that they couldn't have obtained while being in their body. That indicates that they're not in fact extrasensory experiences, but something that happens inside the brain.
It really depends on who you ask. There are people who routinely leave their bodies and go about and "obtain information", as you put it. Heck, there were Learning Annex classes on it. YMMV.
I'm pretty sure that proof of extrasensory experience would yield you a nobel prize, but so far all studies of the subject that I'm aware of were either negative or had their methods heavily critized.
It's a cultural "blockage": overcome the cultural conditioning against it and suddenly "woo-woo" is easy, even trivial. Conversely, you can float like a cloud over the Nobel Prize committee and they won't look up.
If I needed a million dollars I would ESP some lottery numbers.
It's Randi, not Randy. And he's retired now and the "paranormal challenge was officially terminated by the JREF in 2015."
Anyway, I have a lot of respect for him, he does (well, did) good and important work.
But the inability of a guy to encounter "genuine psi" who has made it his life's-work to show "it" to be non-existent does not contradict what I've said in this thread.
> you can learn to see the thoughts around the heads of other people
How do you learn that? If I'm being honest this sounds a bit too far fetched even for someone like myself who's experienced a fair share of strange phenomena that don't fit in the usual narratives.
The Wikipedia link you posted sounds a lot like Raja Yoga. Are they related in any way?
I learned how from a pamphlet I ordered out of the back of a comic book. I'm not kidding, this is true. (O_o) What a world!
There are techniques, but really the essences of it is that we're already doing it but culturally conditioned to pretend we're not. If you overcome the cultural conditioning (in whatever way) "presto" you can perceive thought-forms "of others" (in quotes because thoughts are not ours, they're independent(-ish).) Have you ever noticed how some homeless crazy people mutter stuff that seems like it was related to what you're thinking, like they can see your thoughts? Yeah, that's because they can, poor bastards.
FWIW, I consider thought-reading to be voyeuristic and an invasion of privacy, as well as useless. Not recommended. (Besides, everybody is just thinking about sex anyway (or videogames these days.))
- - - -
In re: Raja Yoga the goal is the same but the method of Self-Inquiry is superior.
An important difference is that angles are imaginary entities, while I doubt people with give up on explaining the most direct thing they can experience, which is their own consciousness.
My pet theory is there is nothing to explain. It is emergent. Over the next couple of decades, hardware performance improvements and specializations plus algorithmic breakthroughs will make AI start to crawl up the chain from useful pattern matching from messy data to useful dullard able to reason. And we still won't know why because the "insight" is buried in the network state and our little human brains cannot deal with that level of detail.
Consider all emergent phenomena that you know of. Let's say: stock market prices, ant hills, biological organisms, ecosystems, etc, etc. What all these have in common, is that they are too complex to explain in terms of individual interactions, but you can point at the individual interaction. We know that financial markets are made of transactions, of that biological organisms are made of molecular interactions, but they are too complex for us to reason in such terms.
With consciousness, the emergentists are not capable of pointing at the first principle, or building block. For me, the only coherent way to be an emergentist on consciousness is to also be a panpsychist: everything is conscious to a degree, it's just a brute fact of nature (such as, let's say, the fundamental forces).
Maybe this is the case, but I would not bet on that.
Consciousness is a phonomenon unlike any other, in the sense that scientist who study it are studying it from the inside. Science is something that happens 100% within human consciousness. This is why I suspect that it is a phenomenon that is beyond the reach of science. It could even be impossible to explain. There is no reason to assume that we can solve all mysteries.
You can point to a protein being expressed by DNA, and then understand how many protein molecules amount to cells, then tissues, then organs. There is a first principle guiding you all the way, even though the complexity is staggering.
There is no such first principle with interactions of neurons, in the sense that we know of no quality or property of a neuron that could amount to the phenomena "consciousness", in the same way that individual transactions amount to a stock market.
Without this first principle, it's just magical thinking disguised in scientific language.
Consciousness is a computation, and neurons are certainly capable of elementary computation.
So the building block has been pointed at (neurons), and its property given (computation). Is the problem that you don't believe that consciousness can emerge from elementary computation, or you believe that it is possible but we have no proof of it?
I have no problem with agreeing that computation can emerge from neurons. For example, one can show how different neural configurations correspond to logic gates, persistent memory (this requires recurrence) and so on. This is precisely what I mean by valid emergentist models. No magic steps, just complexity.
The problem is that you start by stating that "consciousness is a computation", but I don't know if this is true, and neither do you.
> Is the problem that you don't believe that consciousness can emerge from elementary computation, or you believe that it is possible but we have no proof of it?
My problem is that your hypothesis that "consciousness is a computation" is not testable, and so it does not count as a scientific theory (according to the standard Popperian falsifiability criterion).
Unless/until we have a scientific instrument that measures consciousness, we are just assuming things. I assume that other humans are conscious (by analogy), but I don't know it to be true in a scientific sense.
So it's not a matter of what I believe or not, it's a matter of what science can investigate or not. So far, it looks like the phenomenon of consciousness is beyond its grasp.
> With consciousness, the emergentists are not capable of pointing at the first principle, or building block.
...it sounded like there were no plausible candidates. If computation is a candidate, then it's certainly something they can point at (with the caveat that it's only a candidate and not currently testable). I think if instead you had written something along those lines and avoided the words "not capable of", then hoseja and I wouldn't have reacted.
This is begging the question. Consciousness is the sheer seeming-ness of my experience. Perhaps it is reducible to computation, perhaps not, but this is precisely what is under contention.
Because then you could also point to 'interactions of transistors' and claim that a computer can be conscious. But this claim has been refuted already.
Do individual cells understand Chinese? What a flawed argument, it doesn't at all address the proposition that consciousness is an emergent property of computation. The guy would, stuck in his room for thousands of years, provide unknowingly the computational fabric for the a potential consciousness of the AI.
No, individual cells don't understand Chinese. Neither would individual transistors if strong AI was possible. But that's not what the argument is about. The argument refutes the notion that you could have a complex (in terms of both hardware and software) system that implements an actual mind. This complex system could act exactly has a real mind on the outside, but would have no semantic parsing (i.e. understanding) on the inside.
There is only one conscious entity that you have direct experience of, which is yourself, and as far as you are concerned, all of science is contained within your conscious experience.
You (and also me) reason by analogy, and we assume consciousness in other beings, but we cannot directly observe it or measure it, in the sense that we can measure all the things on which we can do empirical investigations (e.g. an electrical field of a weight).
So maybe science takes place in multiple consciousnesses (this is what I believe, but I can't prove it), but I don't see how it could take place outside of consciousness.
It's really just a personal intuition. I don't have any good argument or explanation to offer...
For what it's worth, I do feel that panpsychism was my "natural" belief when I was a kid, until the adults told me it was crazy to believe in that. I still don't think it's crazy, and there are some people who I respect a lot who believe in panpsychism.
From an emergentist perspective there is nothing to explain - qualia are an illusion created by having a certain level of complexity in the stimuli fed into a brain.
Emergentism has a lot of easy outs once the initial assumption - that it is possible for the self to be an illusion of complexity - is made. If that is palatable then any niggle can be explained away as just part of the illusion.
And that initial assumption is a profoundly personal one, the only consciousness anyone has experience with is their own. Even if we share some initial spark of consciousness across humans there is pretty solid evidence that everyone has a different experience of reality (eg, synesthesia) that make arguing from qualia very hard. It is difficult to see how it isn't just a leap of faith either way. If it is possible, then it is basically certain. If it is impossible, then that is the end of it. Either way we can perfectly account for our experiences.
A humourous interpretation is maybe I'm a philosophical zombie where my consciousness is an emergent soup and you are a genuine consciousness with all sorts of special experiences. That really muddles the water over what the argument is even about; I would reasonably and rationally never be convinced that consciousness existed. All the evidence for the argument would be inaccessible to me but you couldn't exactly dismiss me as not being equal to yourself because you don't have evidence either way either.
That sounds plausible. Another issue I have with emergentism and other functionalist theories is that they don’t seem to account for the persistence of identity across consciousness discontinuities. Your consciousness sometimes vanishes the re-emerges as yourself. Where (or when) is your mind during the leap? Does it perform discrete time travel?
It doesn’t (it could do a discrete leap forward in time). Still, why do I wake up as myself every morning? One of the papers linked in this thread discusses (lack of) object permanence from a QM perspective, I’d like to understand how subject permanence works as well, and functionalism does’t handle that well.
These Socratic games are fun, and I guess I get where you’re coming from. .. but that doesn’t really answer my question regarding subject persistence and the subjective continuity of identity. What emerges tomorrow when I wake up could be another me, like one can argue that a new wave forms after the split.
The ship of Theseus doesn’t help your cause here. I’m not the same person I was 5 seconds ago. The self is obviously mutable, which kind of makes sense as long as there is a continuity of consciousness.
What puzzles me is the persistence of identity across interruptions of consciousness, even though your brain can be mutated while you are not there.
The only mostly permanent thing in the brain is neuronal DNA since most neurons don’t undergo mitosis.
IIRC consciousness is about a regime of brainwaves, while memories (and therefore "continuity" of consciousness) are about the actual neuronal connections, and so "survive" sleep ? (Though sleep is also known to be used to integrate new memories, so in that sense a (slightly) different person wakes up each time.)
I've been researching and thinking about consciousness (and specifically the hard problem) for a while now, and while the whole discussion is interesting, it seems to me that invoking qualia as evidence for the existence of the hard problem (or for there being something "to explain") doesn't really make much sense. Its perfectly plausible, if not likelly, that qualia is also part of the emergent phenomenon . I'm saying this more so to hear what your (or anybody else's) thoughts here are - why would qualia lie "above" or be "unexplainable" by materialism alone?
I don't see how it's perfectly plausible. In fact I see no reason to think it's plausible at all.
What does qualia (plural, btw) "are part of the emergent phenomenon" mean in practice? That just seems to be begging the question.
If you want to explain qualia, you have to do two things. The first is explain the nature of the experiencing entity. This means defining the precise mechanism by which subjective states are experienced by the entity instead of simply existing as objective state correlates. This in turn means explaining the nature of all of subjective experience.
The second is to explain the precise mechanism by which external inputs and internal states generate the experiences the entity has.
Most of the "Well it's obvious and there's no problem here" positions rely on the fallacy that defining a complicated-enough objective correlate - such as the detailed state of a computer with some form of introspection - solves the problem.
It doesn't. In fact it doesn't even begin to understand the problem. It's simply a statement of hope and faith with no empirical support that a complicated-enough state with enough introspection will somehow cross the border from automatic operation to sentient experience, just because it will, obviously.
The crazy thing is that qualia is materialism. This computer you're typing on is a real thing that's also your qualia. The real failure is to say that qualia is a separate thing that doesn't matter in "materialism".
That's similar to my pet theory, except I don't think it will emerge "naturally" from current AI architectures. I think it is an emergent property from various interconnected, competing networks. For consciousness to emerge, it would require a feedback architecture where multiple RNNs not only operate on the same inputs, but on each other's outputs as well.
At least that's my thinking. It's not my area at all.
Much of the philosophizing about consciousness is complicated by attempts to preserve a role for something other than an information theoretic entity operating on an electrochemical substrate. The attempts are motivated by a desire to have something that might last beyond the death of the substrate - something akin to a "soul" in Western Christian religion.
It's important to divorce consciousness from all ideas of "thought", "will" etc. to consider it's essence which is more connected with "awareness of being", though even that is too complex I think.
Obviously this is complete conjecture, but it has growing philosophical support - at least as an idea worth discussing - I think.
http://www.eoht.info/page/Panexperientialism