Not only religious minds, but modern philosophers too, hold onto dualism - David Chalmers and his "hard problem" of consciousness is a case in point. Here, "hard" signifies what science can't touch, suggesting a distinct domain.
Likewise, philosophers such as Giulio Tononi with his Integrated Information Theory are edging towards panpsychism, the idea that everything possesses a shred of consciousness. This, too, is a somewhat religious stance.
I personally see no hard problem and believe only certain systems harbor consciousness. The magic element is simply evolution. Evolution, an open-ended optimizer, crafted everything in a singular run.
Consciousness exists to safeguard the body and ensure self reproduction, it is the inner optimization loop, the outer one being evolution. That's the link I see between them, they work together and each one is creating/supporting the other.
I can't agree with that. Maybe our brains are not big enough, or complex enough yet to really understand what is going on with such complex systems.
Evolution may be the mechanism these complex systems exist, but it doesn't explain how they work.
Even the simplest artificial evolutionary algorithms have created integrated circuits with features we can not understand or explain.
And part of the reason is physical properties of materials, and quantum stuff. The evolutionary algorithm doesn't understand those things, just puts them in some working configuration by chance.
Anyway, my point is that we can't also use evolution as a catch-all explanation. Complex things are complex, and they require proper understanding, an engineering understanding, not just the handwaving arguments of philosophers.
About consciousness: hardest problem ever. I don't think we will be able to understand it, because we have it and it becomes a kind of strange loop.
It's fairly easy to "understand it" if we don't try to explain it away. Look, no matter what you hold as true, you reach a point where you have to pick your ontological primitive. An as such, you can't "explain it away". It will be your given of nature, in function of which you'll explain everything else.
Failing to do so will put you in an infinite regress of finding lower-level explanation forever, which in turn would explain precisely nothing.
Even hardcore materialists do this epistemic step: the quantum foam is the given of existence, made out of nothing else other than itself, and whose excitations give rise to the fundamental particles.
So, given that we are already committed to such epistemic step, what would be the problem of choosing another ontological primitive and see how we fare?
What is the logical argument by which consciousness ought not to be chosen as an ontological primitive?
Another example has to do with what we could call the “hard problem” of existence itself: why does the universe exist, and why this universe in particular?
Plenty of theories have been proposed. Maybe the universe expands and contracts again and again, each time with slightly different cosmological constants. Or maybe there are infinite universes and, unsurprisingly, we happen to exist in the one which was suited to our existence. Or maybe everything is just one giant simulation.
What I find fascinating is that, once you remove the culture-specific veneer, these questions and our tentative answers are part of the same pursuit that centuries ago would have taken the shape of philosophy or theology.
The universe might not exist objectively, but it gains existence only in our eyes. For example, natural numbers is an abstraction that has no meaning by itself, but each number can be interpreted as a state of the "game of life" and a sequence of numbers - as an evolution of that game. This meaning is a fiction that arises when abstract number are seen thru our consciousness. When the same numbers are seen thru another consciousness, the game of chess is brought into existence. So the universe might be such an abstraction that could be anything, but only when its seen thru a particular consciousness, it appears as the universe we know. Taking this idea further, the entire game of life is still too complex, so smaller consciousnesses filter that complex reality into smaller realities and so on.
As the story goes, Dr. Samuel Johnson challenged the claim that all of reality was just an illusion by kicking a rock while proclaiming "I refute it thus."
Yes. The burden is proof is supposed to be on the person making a claim that breaks the known pattern.
We can think of consciousness in it's most simple terms as an experience of any number of bits of data.
If we are to accept that we ourselves have experiences, which we must lest we go down a fun pathway to madness (that I highly recommend for those excited by the prospect of existential crises), then there is no reason to accept that "lower" life forms do not also have experiences.
This chain of reasoning follows down, down, down, into what we may think to be simpler and simpler experiences of being. Down to the insects, and then the microbes.
There comes a point where whether something is alive or not becomes more about its ability to create cogent copies of itself, which certainly does not feel like a requirement of having an experience.
Beyond that lies the Earth, the wind, the rain, the basic elements our ancestors have respected and reverred for millenia in societies that did not invent the patriarchal dichotomy between subject and object that teaches us the unfounded "fact" that there are some things called "objects" which have no experience of reality, that we the "subjects" may control entirely.
Get deeper into intuitive practices, and one may have experiences of interacting with so called "objects" in ways that suggest a deep union between subject and object.
A union that precludes the separation our hectic monkey minds have been taught.
It is as if every particle of this universe is "alive" in its own writhing way, at different scales. All feeling the subtle vibrations of others.
The burden of proof is on those that say that consciousness "stops" at some point and the entity becomes an object, yet a mechanism has never been found.
The belief in fully unconscious objects, is then, faith based.
The "hard" problem of consciousness is only a problem when you want it to be.
I believe in the beginning of A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawkings, he mentions a similar problem where it's equally difficult to imagine a universe that always exists as a universe that was created by "something" that always existed.
I'm sure I'm butchering something about this interpretation in the decades since I've read it.
My point is this seems to be a similar problem where it's equally difficult to imagine that consciousness is something that arises from sufficiently complex systems, as it is to imagine its inherent to all systems.
I'm not saying you're wrong, I'm just saying I'm not certain you're right. I can see it either way.
> We can think of consciousness in it's most simple terms as an experience of any number of bits of data.
If you interpret the word that way, it becomes completely uninteresting and, as you explore, makes us no different from some germ or collection of molecules.
And is this such an issue? Does the world have to be a fancy lights show in order to be palatable? Isn't there enough wonder in the galaxies and the specks of dust, do we really to invent the almighty to make humans feel... special? because I guess that's what it all is, fragile egos can't take being anything less than The Chosen. Which explains also religious wars - this town is not big enough for two chosen.
I just meant that "experiencing bits of data" is a meaningless description of human consciousness, not that human consciousness is a divine phenomenon.
That's only true if the supremacy of your self and your conscious experience is the lens through which you find things interesting. It's also kind of reductive.
We are a collection of germs and molecules. We share a lot of commonalities with the units we are composed of. That doesn't make us "no different" than them, when taken as a whole. It certainly doesn't have to make us or the world uninteresting.
Everyone who does serious work on consciousness defines it that way.
It's only naive, over-confident people jumping into conversations they don't understand who define it as something else.
We can also talk about cognitive abilities, sentience, etc., but these are distinct concepts from consciousness and it's extremely valuable to maintain that distinction if you want to have productive discussions.
> Everyone who does serious work on consciousness defines it that way.
What? As "experiencing bits of data"? That's ridiculous, a stone experiences bits of data as scratches on its surface. You could say that it "experiences its environment", but that's semantics and has almost nothing to do with human consciousness - or at least with the interesting parts of it.
Experience as phenomenological subjective experience. I.e., to experience "the color yellow" rather than just the physiochemical processes associated with incidence of photons of a particular wavelength, or "sour" rather than just interacting with certain kinds of acids.
Philosophy of mind scholars have been very consistent about this for the longest time. I would recommend reading some of the literature they have produced to become more acquainted.
However "interesting parts of human consciousness" as you put it are still outside the realm of consciousness per se, and can be more adequately described as "cognition", "awareness", "agency", "sentience", etc. Each concept is distinct (but related) from the others and it's unproductive at this point in our collective development of theory and study to lump them all under a single umbrella term.
Consciousness is a relatively boring question when limited to this definition, but that just means you need to change your language to remain comprehensible, not to redefine words that already have very precise meanings.
I can give you my personal thoughts on the matter, they may align more closely to yours than you may initially assume. As a quick note, complex systems are interesting primarily because they encode features of their environment in their physical makeup, kind of like your rock example. Rocks can't really "do" anything with that information except roll and crack differently than if they didn't have those scratches, but when you really drill down into this phenomenon, there's no bright line between the encoding of scratches on rock surfaces and slightly more complicated systems like river deltas changing the path of water in response to upstream flows (a kind of analog computer encoding the history of its "experiences") or even more complicated systems like lineages of organisms encoding their experiences in DNA via natural selection based on the history of its (the lineage -- not each individual organism) interaction with its 4D environment. None of this really has anything to say about what rocks or river deltas or organisms or whole lineages are experiencing according to the definition of consciousness above, and it seems impossible to access any kind of scientific evidence one way or the other, which is most of the reason that scholars (Chalmers) came up with the "hard problem of consciousness" to at least acknowledge and refine the difficult questions still facing us in this field of study.
The hard problem, in essence, deals with the question of how qualities emerge from quantities. Until we have explained this, then holding materialism is religious. That is, assuming as true something that we have no access to, no explanation for, and no reasons to believe it.
I am not sure why you think that panpsychism would be a religious stance? What's religious about assuming that the only _given_ of existence is in fact fundamental? And I'm not even arguing for panpsychism here, since I don't find it tenable. But at least it's not materialism, which I would argue is the maximum form of abstraction and therefore religious in nature.
> panpsychism, the idea that everything possesses a shred of consciousness
What I find hard about that is that it would seem that consciousnesses are discrete -- mine is distinct from yours. I'm also probably the main consciousness in my body (or I wouldn't be able to type this). But "everything" isn't discrete.
If the sea is conscious, what about every individual liter of water in it? What about every drop? If the drops end up in my body, does it still have consciousness?
Panpsychism posits that every atom harbors some non-zero level of consciousness, and that by arranging bits of consciousness in certain ways, you can amplify it's effect. Its important to consider that consciousness is likely a scale, with different beings experiencing different levels and types of consciousness.
It may seem that way, but that doesn't necessarily mean it is that way. After all, our brains do an incredible amount of filtering and modulating to deliver our conscious experience such as it is, unified and discrete. If it is as fundamental as the panpsychists believe (and I don't count myself firmly among them, but I have to entertain the possibility), it seems possible, if not likely, that there is a good deal of fuzziness and overlap in and among systems of consciousness.
I’m not a proponent of this theory, but I don’t see why it’s unreasonable that if the ocean has some sliver of consciousness, then the water in your body has about 1 / 10^-17 that much.
I find the phrasing of the hard problem very strange. It's fairly obvious to anyone that has done a bit of meditation, that consciousness is simply attention to autonomous actions that your brain performs i.e. the compilation and discrimination of data from disparate systems. If you stop being attentive you start performing actions less consciously.
This aligns fairly closely to what happens when we train ANN's utilizing attention based learning. We see that new emergent capabilities arise. We simply haven't built attention based multimodal training courses yet. I hope we never will.
I believe that GP was talking about dualism in the philosophy of mind context. In that context dualism basically means that there is a mind and a brain and that in some sense those are two radically different kinds of things.
I don't think panpsychism is really a religious stance, it's just a logical solution to the problem of qualia. It certainly isn't testable and there are a lot of people who come to views that are loosely called panpsychism through less rigorous and more spiritual routes, but I would suggest those are quite different and shouldn't dilute the core reasoning behind panpsychism.
Likewise, philosophers such as Giulio Tononi with his Integrated Information Theory are edging towards panpsychism, the idea that everything possesses a shred of consciousness. This, too, is a somewhat religious stance.
I personally see no hard problem and believe only certain systems harbor consciousness. The magic element is simply evolution. Evolution, an open-ended optimizer, crafted everything in a singular run.
Consciousness exists to safeguard the body and ensure self reproduction, it is the inner optimization loop, the outer one being evolution. That's the link I see between them, they work together and each one is creating/supporting the other.