This is why I am extremely skeptical of "anti-materialists" or whatever you want to call people like Seth: if conscious is not mere computation, what is your theory? Do you even have a theory? Why did I read a several hundred word interview with you about this topic and come away without any understanding of your alternative theory?
I am open to alternative theories on this topic but none seem to be clear or grounded enough to describe in a few clear paragraphs. To me, that is damning.
In my opinion, if consciousness turns out to be anti-material meaning after years and years we cannot replicate or find any model to explain it. Then we have to assume that it is contained outside of the "system" which could only mean that the world is built around consciousness and everything else is a dream or simulation.
However I don't actually believe this, just an idea. I think consciousness is probably much more simpler than we think, if you look at evolution it developed very quickly compared to other things.
I think for consciousness you need a sophisticated mental model of the world, but also a sophisticated mental model of other intentional agents and their mental processes. You need to be able to reason about the knowledge, beliefs and likely actions of others.
When this is generalised to enable modelling and reasoning about our own knowledge, beliefs and intentions, that’s consciousness. We literally become aware of ourselves in ways we can reason about.
I actually don’t think most living things, even animals, are conscious. Mammals and some other higher animals possibly.
Simple organisms have simple sense/response nervous systems. Their reactions are mostly automatic, but can learn basic patterns of stimuli.
> I think for consciousness you need a sophisticated mental model of the world, but also a sophisticated mental model of other intentional agents and their mental processes.
A random find[1] that I found interesting. Some quotes:
A growing set of experiments therefore appears to establish a key prediction of [Attention Schema Theory]: without consciousness of an item, attention on the item is still possible, but the control of attention with respect to that item almost entirely breaks down. The relationship is not “consciousness is attention”; instead, it is “consciousness is necessary for the control of attention.”
AST also predicts that people construct models of other people’s attention [...]. Ample evidence confirms that this is so.
Activity in at least some subregions of the [temporoparietal junction] has also been found in association with one’s own attention. Moreover, TPJ activity is associated with the interaction between attention and reported consciousness. A recent study argued that this activity is consistent with error correction of a predictive model of attention.
You could say the exact same thing about the "soul".
I just do not understand why we can't take the idea that consciousness doesn't exist seriously. The word practically has no meaning.
"We know consciousness exists because we are conscious" is as circular reasoning as it gets.
It is so strange to me that we can't even be bothered to explore if this question is the 21st century version of how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.
There has to be so many things that we currently believe to be true that are utter nonsense. When we believe something exists but we can't even define what the word means that is probably a good place to look for nonsense.
I think there's a legit line of inquiry in trying to develop a "top down" picture of reality rather than "bottom up". Eg instead of taking the physical laws and objects as fundamental and ourselves as something that can be constructed within it, what if we instead recognize that whatever argument you make is in fact made to convince myself and others, and therefore the existence of myself and other conscious entities is an irrefutable axiom of the argumentation based reasoning we use.
Given just conversational conscious entities and the words they pass around as the only a priori existent things, can we use these as tools to construct a picture of the familiar physical sort of reality. In other words, failing constructing consciousness from the bottom up, can we construct our picture of the physical from the top down?
I think it is possible to build up a rational case for an objective universe starting with just perception. Firstly if the only thing that exists is conscious awareness, where does the informational content of the world you perceive come from? It doesn't come from your awareness, because you are not aware of it until you perceive it. You can say it comes from the subconscious, but the subconscious is not part of your conscious awareness. It's external to it, in the same way that your hand is external to your conscious awareness. There has to be an origin for perceptions that is external to conscious awareness of those perceptions.
From there we observe that these perceptions are of a consistent and persistent form, so it’s rational to conclude that they have an origin in a consistent and persistent source. From there, and taking into account our ability to test our perceptions through action, we can build up knowledge about the world of our experiences.
As for trusting logic and rationality, does it give consistent and useful results? Test it and see if it continues to work reliably over time. If applying logic provides random, contradictory or unreliable results that’s a problem, but maybe you can correct that by modifying how you reason about things and trying again. That’s learning. So I think we do have the cognitive tools we need to build up a robust account of reality starting from base perception.
We didn’t start off human society and civilisation with scientific laws as our founding axioms. We inferred them from sense data, including the process of physically testing our ideas in the world.
It's such a cursed term that the thing some people mean by it does exist, like the ability to sense things around you, communicate on a human level, and have an operant short term memory of at least 5 minutes.
When I see someone use "consciousness", I'm assuming they mean something grander akin to a soul, like a special, immutable self that they feel like they possess, which I think is just embellishing an illusion the mind creates for itself. Some people do mean it that way, but some not.
It should be scrapped from our vocabulary since it just scrambles communication.
This is a fundamentally different situation, because it's very possible that consciousness is the only thing that we can or will ever experience directly. I agree that things like UFOs cannot be explained in that way, because those experiences are products of our sense-making, but consciousness is the act of sense-making itself which is hard to deny.
I don’t buy this at all. We have experiences. It’s the one brute fact we are sure of, but it’s enough to build from that a coherent materialist model of the world that is consistent and testable. Everything we think and know is built up from the foundation of our conscious experiences though.
I’m no solipsist, I’m a thoroughgoing materialist, but if we don’t accept the evidential nature of our conscious experiences as being real phenomena, we have nothing.
You could just reference the philosophical literature. Qualia is the technical term for sensations of color, sound, smell, taste, tactile sensations and any other bodily sensation. It's very strange for someone to talk about consciousness not existing. You don't experience color, sound or pain? What about inner dialog, imagination or dreams?
The soul has nothing to do with this in the modern philosophical debate.
Tend to agree. Consciousness is a social fact evidenced by it's plurality of grounding, single cultural origin, and memetic propagation. The idea itself is barely 500 years old. If it is a fundamental aspect of the human experience, why wouldn't it have origins stretching back to prehistory?
We have cultural artefacts of people reporting first person experiences going back as long as we have writing, and longer from oral traditions. These are in the form of narratives, poetry, songs, etc. What is the story of Narcissus about if not the immediate visceral stimulation of visual experience?
We can also infer it. I find it hard to see why cultures would produce representative art if they had no experience of seeing it. In a world without first person experience it’s hard for me to imagine what function representational art would have.
At the same time, we have philologists who agree that Descartes was the first to use "conscientia" in a way that doesn't match the historical use of conscientia and instead matches our use of the word "consciousness" and John Locke was the first to use of the word "consciousness" in the same way we use it today.
Additionally we can point to Jaynes' The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind as a theory that doesn't assume a historical consciousness (or at least in the same what).
So it seems like the argument is that consciousness didn’t exist because we didn’t have a word for it and the guy wrote a book and built a career with that as a premise.
Honestly, can I even be bothered? Oh, alright then, just for fun.
Yes I know I simplify above, but honestly not by all that much. There’s a history of the development of styles of literature. Sure. But that doesn’t mean the world, or people, changed because ways of describing or creating narratives about them changed.
At the root of this seems to be the idea that we can’t have a thing such a consciousness without the idea of the thing, and other examples given in evidence are baseball and money. This is flat out wrong.
Nobody sits down with a blank piece of paper and invents a new ball game from scratch. All the ball games we have were developed by playing with balls. You just have done this. A bunch of kids get together and start messing with a ball, they appropriate objects in their environment into the game such as sticks and posts and such, make up rules as they go. Over time things happen in the game they didn’t expect and they invent new rules to cover those circumstances. Eventually they have a great game they love, they give it a name and then free inventing the game they write down the rules.
It’s the same with money, it started off as tokens representing goods, then they established the lowest value object as the basic rate of exchange such as a chicken or a bag of grain, then they work out exchange rates between different tokens such as 5 chickens equals one sheep, then they mark the tokens with symbols, etc, etc. Eventually you get money. Nobody looked at a market and deduced you know what, we need to invent money. The concept emerges from the practice.
My wife has Aphantasia, which means she doesn’t subvocalise. She doesn’t hear an inner voice when she reads, and can’t imagine what that’s like. She also cannot imagine visual images, yet she reports the same first person experience the rest of us have. So the idea that language creates consciousness seems to fail right there. We also have reports from people that don’t learn language until late in childhood of first person conscious experience from before they learned language.
So I’m sorry, it’s bunk. There never was any actual evidence for it, the chain of reasoning inserts conclusions that don’t follow from its arguments, and there’s clear evidence that contradicts its assumptions.
There's also things that don't exist until people have words for them, where the very act of speaking it brings about its existence. It seems equally likely that consciousness wouldn't have been self-evident without someone being primed to perceive it as a category.
I’m my view I think the early emergence of consciousness says that it’s more complicated not less. My reasoning is that it must mean the framework for consciousness is embedded in the basic building blocks of life. If that’s the case then our understanding of how those basic building blocks work still has a long way to go. To make a physics analogy it’s like we have a good understanding of mechanics but haven’t yet learned what electromagnetism is.
I have not read the article but I would love to have a real debate with a materialist. All anti-meterial models will skew sightly mystical so if you have zero appetite for that I won’t bother. But I’d like to try to change your mind if you’re interested.
I’ll start: Consciousness has nothing to do with any sort of processing. Processing is “dead” in the sense of a desktop calculator. Consciousness is the “living” part of your experience - that which experiences. Any process is the content of experience, not the subject.
I’ll stop here for now.
EDIT: currently this comment is at a 0 score. If you disagree with me, please leave a reply and I will try to get to you, but don't blindly downvote me cause I'd like to talk to more people, that's all. I'm not some religious zealot, you can check my post history etc.
You are simply defining consciousness and information processing in terms of alive and dead. If those are your axiomatic assumptions, you’ve already established the outcome before evaluating the issues.
Consciousness may be more than processing information, but it is definitely processing information. Perceptions go in, and decisions come out. Along the way we also form memories.
When we experience something, qualia if you like, it matters to us. That process stimulates us, interests us and often it prompts us to action. Those are all information processes. Stimulation is a signal. Interest and attention is metadata about the experience. Being prompted to action is making a decision. These are all intrinsically processes on and about information.
I agree with everything you're saying, but I think we just are referring to different things when we say consciousness. Take any qualia, and there are 2 sides to it: The object of it, and the subject of it. A red light is seen. In the seeing of it, there is the red light that is seen, and the seer who sees it.
What you are talking about is a black-box model of consciousness that only relies on external measurement. That is the correct scientific approach, but it comes nowhere close to counsciousness. Consider that maybe you are doing the same thing you think I'm doing. You have defined experience purely in terms of inputs and outputs. The experience is the input, the outputs are perception, volition, will, action, etc. But who's are the perception, volition, will etc? There is something that exists that gives essence to all these.
If this doesn't ring true at all, we can stop here. Objective language can only get so far when talking about the subject, unfortunately. Thanks for taking the time to reply.
I don’t just believe it exists, I know it exists, just like you know it exists, because you are conscious, because you are. Are you aware of your own existence? How can you know anything if you don’t know the knower?
There words may not make any sense to you right now, and that’s the limitation of objective language: we cannot point at the subjective without metaphor. But if this does sound like it rings a bell, lmk and we can talk more.
The observation of our own consciousness, that is its self recursive nature while we’re in a conscious state, is what makes consciousness special. With other observations we receive a stimulus, we perceive it, and we either act on it, or memorise it or forget it.
While we are doing so, we are aware that we had that perception, however we are also aware of our awareness of the perception.
So the observable property of consciousness is awareness of ‘consciousness awareness’ itself. This is not a paradox, we know how recursive functions work from computer science and mathematics so the concept of the recursivity of a process is logically coherent.
This makes our own consciousness the most observed property in human experience.
There are some experiments that suggest that human actions are not the result of conscious thought. Maybe you've heard about Michael Gazzaniga's experiments on split brain subjects. The most radical interpretation of the results is that our conscious thought merely constructs a narrative about actions it has no direct control of.
In other words, our brains act like a bunch of interconnected neural networks and one of them, the language processing part, tries to make sense of what all the others are doing, serving the only purpose of communicating with others.
I wasn’t aware of that research, thanks, but I do agree most cognition is subconscious. When talking rapidly, the words seem to just spill out from nowhere. Ideas simply spring to mind. We have no direct awareness if the cognitive processes that generate them.
We can reason consciously step by step, but it’s an incredibly slow process. It seems likely that consciousness has something to do with attention management and broadcast communication across brain regions and functions.
Which is part of the reason why I think LLMs are a big deal. LLMs talk like the inner voice, and their failure modes are strikingly similar to the failure modes of "gut instinct" / first reactions and "stream of thoughts". I don't think this is a coincidence - I think we may have stumbled on the main trick that makes biological brains work. I don't mean language here, but rather the use of absurdly high-dimensional latent space for representing relatedness.
Now, if the above is anywhere close to the truth, then taking it together with the research you mention suggests that LLMs aren't simulating or parroting abstract thinking and understanding - they're actually doing it, the same way we do. They just lack an evaluator/censor layer of conscious experience.
You've already fallen into several pits of failure, perhaps without realising it.
Firstly, "alive" and "dead" are very squishy words with no clear definition. You can mould them into whatever you please, but that's not a firm foundation for any kind of debate.
Second, you can't just state your position as fact. You say that "Consciousness has nothing to do with any sort of processing." That's not an argument! You're making an assumption, and treating it as an obvious thing we all agree on. We don't. In fact, it's the main point of disagreement. This is like a theologian assuming the Bible is true because God wrote it, but Atheists don't believe God exists.
"Any process is the content of experience, not the subject." -- this is too vague to respond to. It could mean anything.
Other than hand-wavey, vague things, you've only said one clear thing, which is to assume the outcome that you would like.
Materialists aren't just making assumptions. Tests have been done. Real, scientific experiments. We can (trivially!) alter consciousness through chemical, surgical, or electromagnetic means. Simple physical processes seem to underlie consciousness, and altering those processes alters consciousness.
Every teenager that has taken LSD or mushrooms can attest to this fact. Anyone that has taken a nasty hit to head can experience this first hand.
I admit my language is squishy. Sometimes it helps point to what I'm trying to point to. And I know where you are coming from, as someone who was a materialist for much of my life. We are simply talking about different things.
You are talking about the contents of consciousness - the things that get altered by physical processes. We don't need tests to establish that. When the sun rises, the contents of my consciousness change from black to orange, thus we know that physical processes can change the contents of my awareness.
I am taking about consciousness itself. When the sun rises, the sky is the same, even it now seems orange.
> When the sun rises, the sky is the same, even it now seems orange.
I don't understand what point you're trying to make. When the sun rises, the colour of the sky changes in ways measurable with physical devices and noticeable to animal and human eyes. It is not "the same" in any sense. Different photons traverse it, its temperature changes, ionisation of its gas molecules change, etc...
Yeah, but "it" is the same sky. The presence or absence of particles does not alter the sky itself. More accurately, space is independent of it's contents. Mind you, this is only a metaphor. Consciousness is not physical space. Just like physical space is the "space" of physical objects; Consciousness is the "space" of perception.
You share almost nothing in common with who you were when you were 5 years old. Even if all the cells in your body have been replaced, and all your thoughts and your way of thinking itself has changed, you are still the same person. It's the same consciousness. That continuity is you. You are that consciousness. Do you see it?
That’s the Ship of Theseus argument. I think there’s a reasonable argument that in fact we don’t have continuity of consciousness. Yes we are consistent persistent beings up to a point, but inky in the way that the ship of Theseus continues to be the same ship.
I think of consciousness as being an activity. It’s something we sometimes do. We don’t do it in deep sleep, or when anaesthetised. But when we wake up is it the same consciousness? We remember being conscious previously, and that memory accords with what we experience ‘now’, but is that the same thing?
I think it depends how you look at it. I drove my car yesterday. If I get in it today and start the engine, is it the same ‘running of the engine’ as yesterday?
> I think there’s a reasonable argument that in fact we don’t have continuity of consciousness.
One argument that just came to me now: we already know we don't have continuity of vision - we go blind during saccades. We just don't notice, because the brain is happy to extrapolate from the last visual inputs, or otherwise completely make up what we see, going as far as screwing with our perception of time to fake continuity of experience.
The same could be true for consciousness itself. Visual system is a proof that the brain can and does aggressively smoothen out discontinuous experiences.
> I think it depends how you look at it. I drove my car yesterday. If I get in it today and start the engine, is it the same ‘running of the engine’ as yesterday?
Exactly. It's a different "running of the engine" for the purposes of your typical conversation and thinking. It's a different "running" in terms of battery charge maintenance. It's the same "running" for general car maintenance. So, different/different/same. If you're on a trip, your engine dies, and you immediately restart it, it's same/different/same. If you drive your car after having it sit a month in a garage, it's different/different/different.
When we sleep or get knocked out, we are aware that we've been unconscious for a period of time. But there could be other cases where we effectively lose consciousness for shorter periods of time - seconds perhaps - and the brain produces illusion of continuity, in the same way we get blind during saccades and the brain masks it out from our awareness by synthesizing data and screwing with the clock.
> When we sleep or get knocked out, we are aware that we've been unconscious for a period of time.
Not always, at least not in the ways that matter.
When I was a teenager, there was one occasion when I went to bed at night, pulled the bedsheets over my head, and with no subjective pause or discernible change of subjective internal experience of my mental state everything became bright, I pulled the bedsheets away from my face, and it was morning.
Take one more step back. When you are in deep sleep, your mind is absent, and so are all sensations, but what is it that registers these breaks-in-mind-continuity? You are that host, that reality, that being that never sleeps.
In the sense that you are asking, I can't answer this question, because I don't know. Perhaps ants and up have it? idk, there is no way to know. There is no way to even know if other people definitely HAVE consciousness, I take it on faith. I can only KNOW for sure that I have consciousness. How do I know that? Because I am conscious of it. Is this circular? Yes. In fact, this is the ONLY absolute reality that I can positively assert, without reference to any other fact or axiom. The fact that I can think, or that I have a body, or that it's day outside, all of these first need me to be conscious. So, yes, it's circular, and it's true, and you know it's true that you are conscious. And you don't need process any information to know that you are conscious. It's prior to all that.
> Consciousness is the “living” part of your experience - that which experiences.
That's circular, what is experience, what is "that which"? I propose a simple definition - consciousness is what informs actions, and optimises actions to benefit the agent.
That's a concrete definition, without subjective elements.
It's all in there. Consciousness decides actions, it's embedded in every action. Actions change the future timeline, there is consequence in actions, and they provide feedback. It feels like something because it matters how you react. You could die if you don't react correctly, for example.
I have some appetite for it. Either conscious is mere computation or it is not, and either branch should be explored. I think assuming that either branch is correct beyond a reasonable doubt is wrong.
Is there any material (!) you can link me to to explore further?
Look, there is more material about this stuff that perhaps any other subject explored by man, but it frequently comes in ecclesiastic garb and that may or may not be to your taste. I'll can link both spiritual and secular starting points. The spiritual ones are far more delicious. What's your stand on religion in general? I'll link sources appropriately.
OK, but when a materialist says "it's just computation", that's not a theory either. It may be the first step of a theory, but it's only one step. Where's the rest of the theory?
Nobody has a real theory of consciousness, still less an experimentally-verifiable theory. So it seems a bit unfair to exclude anti- (or at least non-) materialists for not having a theory.
Now, you could argue that materialists are at least on the road to a theory, and the anti-materialists are not. On the other hand, if the anti-materialists are right, then the materialists are not on a road to any correct theory, ever. (Being further advanced down the wrong road is not a virtue, except to the degree that you learn more quickly that you need to turn around...)
> it seems a bit unfair to exclude anti- (or at least non-) materialists for not having a theory.
I do not exclude them on the basis of not having (what you consider to be) a theory. They have a theory: consciousness has a non-physical dependency. The materialists theorize that consciousness is merely physical.
The issue I have is that non-materialists seem to be bad at conveying this theory. Just claim belief in the non-physical upfront. The chess vs weather comparison is a terrible analogy. They seem to lack the courage of their conviction and in turn dress up a simple concept.
All of them are proven computational? Mind laying out your evidence for that statement? Because it sounds like what you have is a presupposition, not evidence.
I note that, in your reply to GMoromisato, you asked for evidence. I ask you to meet the standard you expect of others.
I wouldn’t say they are proven computational, but I would say they can be explained in terms of processes on information. Sense data, body awareness, perceptions, noticing things, evaluating situations and options all seem to me to relate to information and processes on it. We use these experiences to form memories and make decisions. Both these are processes on information. Those are all things that consciousness actually does. Is there any function of consciousness we’re aware of that doesn’t relate to information?
That leaves the experience itself. It’s an experience of informational content, but is there more going on than transformations of information? What could that be? Maybe a physical substance, or a physical structure, in which case we should be able to physically synthesis consciousness stuff, or assemble a consciousness structure. What else is there?
Re. your second paragraph: Like others in this thread, you're assuming the answer. Or rather, you're assuming the presupposition. And that's fine, if you want to do that. But be aware that you're doing it, and that it's unproven. (And maybe be aware how much you're doing it.)
> Is there any function of consciousness we’re aware of that doesn’t relate to information?
Maybe awareness of your own emotional state? (Though I'm sure that there are views where that also is information processing, and nothing more.)
Pain (and related feelings) cannot be definitively reduced to computation. I’m open (and even predisposed) to believing it is just computation, but it’s not intuitively obvious.
We don’t even know how to test whether an arbitrary system feels pain.
Whatever else is going on inside our brains, there's definitely information processing happening and we also know that we have a first person experience of it. Our perceptions are informational, they are experiences of data. Colour, feelings, pain, desires. These are all informational and we use them to make decisions. So whatever consciousness is, what it does is process information.
If consciousness itself is not a process on information, then what is it? Another possibility is that it is a substance. Chess is a set of relationships between symbols, but the wetness of a rainstorm is physical water. So is consciousness an actual substance? Where does it go when we don't have it? Is it a chemical that forms at certain times, and is re-combined into another chemical when we lose consciousness? In which case we could synthesis a beaker full of consciousness fluid, or whatever it is.
Dualists say it's a non-material 'substance', but I don't think that's a coherent concept. It must interact with matter, or it couldn't receive sensations and cause effects when we make decisions. But how can it interact with matter and be non-material? If it does interact with matter, then it can be detected and manipulated physically. So why can't we find it? We've been looking at brain chemistry, signals and processes for a while and not found a hint of such a thing. Any other ideas?
I meant that pain cannot currently be reduced to computation. I’m open to believing it’s just computation, but it’s not obvious that it is, unless you assume that everything the brain does is. But then you’re the one assuming.
Like he argues that there's a big difference between software running on hardware and our brains, in that the neurons are dynamic, bathed in chemicals etc while software doesn't interact with the hardware in any substantial way (ie doesn't physically change it).
This is true, but to me it seems much more like optimizations rather than a truly fundamental difference. Surely you could model a neuron in software with non-trivial internal state and which also responds differently based on "ambient parameters" (ala bathed in chemicals).
It would be much harder to train, at least using the methods we do now, but I fail to see a fundamental difference.
>Surely you could model a neuron in software with non-trivial internal state and which also responds differently based on "ambient parameters" (ala bathed in chemicals).
Oh you could. and it's been done. But it's much harder to train and seemingly for no real performance benefit other than "like the brain". Backpropagation is just really efficient.
Bahaha! I always suspected hackernews was all bots and this comment thread confirms it. Just because you don't have a subjective experience doesn't mean us real humans don't! my chatgpt powered pal!
Sorry I didn't know about /s.
I don't judge one way or another. Subject hallucinating the material world, or object hallucinating a subjective experience. I love you all.
This is why I am extremely skeptical of "anti-materialists" or whatever you want to call people like Seth: if conscious is not mere computation, what is your theory? Do you even have a theory? Why did I read a several hundred word interview with you about this topic and come away without any understanding of your alternative theory?
I am open to alternative theories on this topic but none seem to be clear or grounded enough to describe in a few clear paragraphs. To me, that is damning.