The real answer is that we don't yet know enough about how the brain works to work effectively on this problem. We don't know what questions to ask or how to break down the problem into smaller problems.
We may get there. Read something about how vision works from a century ago, when nobody had a clue. The first real progress came from "What the Frog's Eye Tells the Frog's Brain" (1959).[1] That was the beginning of understanding visual perception, and the very early days of neural network technology. Now we have lots of systems doing visual perception moderately well. There's been real progress.
(I went through Stanford CS at the peak of the 1980s expert system boom. Back then, people there were way too much into asking questions like this. "Does a rock have intentions?" was an exam question. The "AI winter" followed. AI finally got unstuck 20 years later when the machine learning people and their "shut up and calculate" approach started working.)
I wholeheartedly agree on your first point. I was a philosophy major and it was frustrating how so much of the philosophy of mind field were attempting to "run" off with their ideas before they could "stand".
I realize this could be true for a lot of other schools of thought, but it seemed especially prominent when arguments about what makes a person seem to rely on a lower-level assumption of how the brain works.
The way I see it, that's basically the definition of philosophy. When some sub-discipline of philosophy becomes clear enough to define its questions, they give it some other name (cf linguistics, economics, "natural philosophy")
What's left as "philosophy" is always the stuff where we don't even really know what questions to ask. So we kick them around for a few centuries, or millennia, in the hopes that something will eventually take on a shape that can be pursued in a better-defined fashion.
I don't know that learning more about the brains operation will satisfy people who resist the notion that their consciousness is a property of a physical system. Since it is an emergent property of a complex system, even if we understood the functioning of each independent piece, we would still be left with the question of why all of those pieces in concert have the property of consciousness. While we gather more and more data on the brain, we barely even have a beginning notion of how emergent properties actually work. If we had to take everything we know about atoms and their interactions and explain where phase transitions and states of matter come from, we would be stymied. We know from experimentation that very large groups of many atoms do experience distinct phase transitions. We know every way individual atoms can interact. But bridging that gap from components to being able to predict large-scale complex nonlinear dynamics... we have more proofs of our inability to do such things (with conventional tools) than hints of how we might tackle it.
We are very much in the infancy of the understanding of the Brain. New tools like optogenetics, CRIPSR-CAS9, and Clarity should assist greatly in understanding the brain and the body in general. Still, we are starting to know that we don't know a lot about the brain.
To me "consciousness" feels mostly like early chemists talking about pholgiston. Or like early biologistis discussing elan vital. Or even current physics' "dark matter". These are words that don't really point to single externalities with sharp borders, instead they are terms we apply to disparate, but seemingly (somehow) related phenomena.
> The real answer is that we don't yet know enough about how the brain works...
I don't think the "problem of consciousness" is one of missing empirical evidence so much as simply a fuzzy (ill-posed?) question. Though enough evidence might be sufficient to forcefully dissolve an irreal question. On the flipside, a lot of the current ML research does a good job at addressing consciousness by breaking it into concrete, communicable actions.
Instead of asking, "What is consciousness?" try asking, "What actions could XYZ take that would convince me it's conscious?" A related question is "What actions (in minute detail) are involved as I believe/think/feel I'm conscious?" Those two questions are similar, but tend to evoke quite different sets of "external" experiences and actions.
It might turn out that there is some mathematically invariant property of things that are capable of acting as convincing conscious agents, a la the physically precise definition of heat turning out to behave kind of like a phlogiston. In such a case, we might in fact find a "thing" that deserves the label "consciousness"---such as Hofstadter's idea of a strange loop---but for now I think the term is used pretty much used in a way that's synonymous with "magic".
>A related question is "What actions (in minute detail) are involved as I believe/think/feel I'm conscious?"
I think we can define a generalized version of what we call a "conscious thought" as a thought that can be "consciously reflected" about. With "conscious reflection" I mean using some representation of the thought as an input for another thought in such a way that the new thought, including the usage of the original thought, can be used as an input for another thought in the same way. The representation doesn't have to correspond particularly closely to the execution. (We remember to think in natural language, but maybe the thought process is just converted into natural language after the fact for the purpose of saving and reflecting.)
Computer programs can also be conscious according to this generalized definition if the process of executing it is saved in some way and can, depending on the circumstances, be used in some way, which is saved in the same way.
That different "ways" of using a thought as an input for another thought are possible means that there can be different consciousnesses in our brain. One of them (if there are multiple), which is the one responsible for our output, at least on a higher level, or does at least significantly inform the output, is what we call "my consciousness". The reason why we don't know whether "my consciousness" is responsible for the output, despite having the appearance, is that it may be mostly a "post-hoc rationalization engine" for decisions made on another level, possibly for other reasons. But it does at least inform the output, since thoughts of "my consciousness" in the past inform our later output. For example, if we are asked about our past thoughts, we talk about the ones that are remembered in "my consciousness". This is the thing that puts it in such a special position compared to other hypothetical consciousnesses, which don't inform our output in this way, and are therefore invisible to other people, and obviously also to "my consciousness".
> On the flipside, a lot of the current ML research does a good job at addressing consciousness by breaking it into concrete, communicable actions.
I wasn't aware ML had anything to do with consciousness.
> In such a case, we might in fact find a "thing" that deserves the label "consciousness"---such as Hofstadter's idea of a strange loop---but for now I think the term is used pretty much used in a way that's synonymous with "magic".
So you consider your experiences of color, taste, pleasure, etc. to be akin to "magic"? Because those sensations are what make up our conscious experiences.
> "Does a rock have intentions?" was an exam question.
What does a good answer to this question look like in this context? Genuinely curious what they were looking for.
Imo the real question is whether humans have intentions. It seems like if you look at it rationally, we're just collections of chemicals reacting with each other. Set the initial conditions and then the whole thing is deterministic. It's pretty uncomfortable to think this though, so I think it's best if we avoid the subject.
I would encourage you to think on this some more until the discomfort diminishes. Just because things are deterministic (at a level of complexity that is difficult or even possible to imagine, let alone predict with our current understanding), doesn't mean your experience is any less real or important for you.
Imagine you are on a rollercoaster: you know your course is pre-determined, but you can't see too far ahead, and it sure is a fun and surprising ride along the way.
I think the question one has to answer first is what "intention" is in itself, at least some informal definition to work with is necessary. how you define it will shape the answer to the rock intention.
> Set the initial conditions and then the whole thing is deterministic
If quantum physics theories are correct than there's always some amount of pure randomness in the game, making it impossible to create perfectly deterministic and repeatable system of any significant complexity.
Videogames are deterministic too, but that doesn't mean all of the things that a player's character does are predetermined inside the videogame. I like to think that there is a similar analogy for our universe, where a soul is controlling our body the same way we might control a game character.
This was a wonderful book. As I recall, it catalogs a lot of convincing evidence that things come into conscious awareness basically upon a certain level of global activation in the brain -- when enough parts of the brain are "talking" about it, typically when different parts of the brain are having conflicting activation patterns. It likens this to the "workspace model" of awareness. And it's clear why the brain would need to resolve such a conflict, why it would need something like focus or attention to do so, and how this would relate to all sorts of information processing needs of organisms that behave in ways that keep them alive.
But there's just nothing that I recall in that book that suggests or even hints at any reason for this to result in a subjective experience. And I don't believe it rules out an electron having a nano-unit of subjective experience, for example.
The book suggests that something is a subjective experience if an organism can report it as one, and goes to great detail about what's going on in the brain when an organism is able to report a subjective experience, and makes the very reasonable suggestion that something is probably a subjective experience in a brained organism that can't report it as one so long as it exhibits all the same patterns in that organism's brain (infants, other animals).
But I don't think it does any work at all to show that there is no subjective experience in plants, or rocks, or even nano-units of subjective experience in individual electrons. It can't do this, because, as far as I recall, there is simply no progress on the problem of why this global activation in the brain would produce a subjective experience.
Eh, this still doesn't go beyond the fundamental "I think therefore I am." I can prove to myself that I have consciousness, but for everyone else, ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
>The real answer is that we don't yet know enough about how the brain works to work effectively on this problem.
If we imagine there's a God and I could ask any 1 question about the brain and get an anaswer, all I would need to ask is:
"Hey God: w.r.t. the human brain, are there any special shenanigans like is connected to a soul that's responsible for consciousness, or is it WYSIWYG, just a bunch of cells and that's it?"
Luckily for you, there is no God and I can answer definitively: no, there are no shenanigans. It's just some cells and that's it. I am telling you this definitively. There are no metaphysical shenanigans going on in the human brain.
Note: you might wonder why, for this answer, I decided to phrase it in terms of asking God. The answer is in order to activate the natural scientist's reaction "that's silly, God can't tell you there's no God like that". Well, brain metaphysics is exactly and equally silly. It's just some cells, that's all.
Interesting. Three points one from science, one from spiritual and one from literature.
1) This article talks about "causal entropic force" which can give "intentions" to inanimate object. https://www.wired.com/2017/02/life-death-spring-disorder/
2) Read somewhere that instead of figuring out "self" exist or not, Buddha suggested to observer and realize how concept of "self" arise.
3) In the book "of human bondage" author writes, the concept of self arises from pain.
> I went through Stanford CS at the peak of the 1980s expert system boom. Back then, people there were way too much into asking questions like this. "Does a rock have intentions?" was an exam question. The "AI winter" followed. AI finally got unstuck 20 years later when the machine learning people and their "shut up and calculate" approach started working.
Isn't it the other way round, though?
They were twiddling their thumbs back then because they had no other option. There was no way to do machine learning back then. I've played with perceptrons on '90s hardware and it was basically just a toy.
And then Moore's law opened the flood gates some decades later.
I used a Cray Y-MP back then but you're still right... My iPhone is faster than that hardware now, which is pretty neat.
It wasn't so much "thumb twiddling" though, there was a lot of work being done on systems which were more focused on knowledge representation (like Cyc [1], which still exists). Also a lot of work was being done from a more Psychological direction (mental models, scripts etc) and from a physical/neuro-science direction (brainz!).
These were all happening simultaneously and it wasn't clear (partly because of the MIPS issue you mention) that ML was the winning pony (for now) and I still appreciate the broad spectrum of knowledge covered in my particular Cognitive Science program.
It seems obvious now, but back then it wasn't obvious that "AI" required a learning system at all. Knowledge Engineering was a popular approach, and rules based systems running over knowledge bases were supposed to be the path to AI.
And don't forget Minsky's decimation of neural network research at the start of the 1970s [1], which led to major research centers like MIT ignoring them completely.
Personally, I think the brain as a data processing unit is a model that's seriously limiting the way many philosophers and neuroscientists think about this problem. You may be able to correlate an individual's reported experience of periwinkle down to the exact number of potassium ions crossing the cell membrane of every relevant neuron upon there acknowledgement of the color, but you still will know nothing about why it feels like something to see periwinkle.
Maybe the focus on the brain is part of the problem. Sure, neuroscience has yielded some interesting results, but consciousness is a social and behavioral phenomenon, and the brain evolved to satisfy such social and behavioral constraints. The acceptance per se of the Turing test suggests the brain may be irrelevant here.
We do. We know enough to state with absolute certainty that it's an emergent property. Nothing in your head is conscious. Nothing. Not even the whole of the human mind. It's in the "software", it's something you learned (and therefore did not have even when you were born, not even until quite a bit after that).
It's equally clear that most of what we associate with consciousness, such as thinking, awareness of the body and the moment and time and decision making and ... doesn't exist either. Because time and time again studies prove that when a decision is made (this is well studied in traffic for instance) there are no conscious reasons. Reasons only happen afterwards.
Is it therefore such a stretch to say that consciousness simply doesn't exist until long after the fact, and it is only once we ask one of these bags of mostly water to explain themselves (or ... well when we ask them something) that any trace of consciousness, at least the way humans understand it, is actually forthcoming ?
Consciousness is a trick. A learned trick. Human minds are not conscious and it is most definitely not a certainty that they, even when born fully formed and healthy that they will become conscious (read the reports on children raised by animals. They are old, sometimes 20 years old and they most definitely aren't conscious, not even on the level that a primate is conscious. The 12 year old boy they found in the wild in France never learned to speak only to articulate 2 words).
This is weird, because this is not most humans experience. Everyone around them always had consciousness. But let's compare. Everybody who has kids realizes that memory, firstly, isn't actually memory. We are very much not storing events when they happen in our brain. We learn a trick, because our parents keep referring to our past and "what we've done". We learn to calculate back from our current state of mind to what happened before.
That and of course philosophers have a millennium or 3 of history of ... philosophers getting consciousness wrong. Consciousness has been accepted in history to be being religious, to being able to rhyme, to composing music, to being able to talk and explain ourselves, to being able to love, to convince a professor (via chat) that you are conscious, to solve problems (all kinds), to walk around, to play chess, to ... all of these are now of course considered wrong. Why ? Mostly because things that definitely aren't conscious, from little dumb tricks, even mechanical contraptions in some cases, to rule based engines, to deep learning and now reinforcement learning algorithms can do this.
So can we please just conclude that whatever this article claims is ... wrong ? Just wrong. Nothing of value, other than perhaps interest a few people for stories with enough alcohol present. The current consensus seems to be that more details will be forthcoming the first time a reinforcement learning algorithm gets far enough to explain it's actions. So you want to know more ? Start there.
You assume that there is a physical reality "out there", because you perceive and you experience it (or you don't, in which case you are a p-zombie). The theory you are proposing is probably the most widely accepted theory in scientific circles, which is that consciousness is an emergent property of the brain, but that ultimately everything that causes this consciousness are just impersonal, physical events devoid of an inherent quality of "experiencing". When you die, that consciousness ceases to exist. Fair enough.
However, I think the article is simply suggesting to invert this assumption about physical reality. It proposes that for something to be "out there", you first need an "in here" (rather than afterwards), i.e. an experiencing of forms. This would be consciousness. At this point we are not even talking about decision making, thinking, memory, intellectual pursuits... Just subjective experience. So everything you're taking into the discussion regarding how thinking and decision making and memory happens is really a bridge further; not immediately relevant to the point the author is making.
I understand if this line of reasoning feels uncomfortable. You were literally pleading people to think that this is wrong. I think that is a mistake. There is value in challenging your assumptions, even if only philosophical with ethical/moral ramifications.
> It's equally clear that most of what we associate with consciousness, such as thinking, awareness of the body and the moment and time and decision making and ... doesn't exist either. Because time and time again studies prove that when a decision is made (this is well studied in traffic for instance) there are no conscious reasons. Reasons only happen afterwards.
Since a person can tell what they experience and what they do not, the distinction between conscious experience and unconscious processing must have a base in physical reality (brain activity). With sufficiently advanced technology, one could analyze the brain processes and see which processes are associated with the reported conscious experience.
The fact that not all brain activity is associated with conscious experience in no way implies that conscious experience does not exist.
Didn't all organic life arise from inorganic molecular structures like rocks?
As a result of the theory of the big bang, molecular structures have progressively evolved in complexity, eventually becoming so complex that the boundaries of physics and chemistry are transcended into biology, life, and consciousness.
This suggests that "rocks" -- inorganic molecular structures -- indeed have "intentions" to the extent that they are primordial building blocks of consciousness
Please don't say things like this, the theory of the big bang says no such thing at all. What it says is how the universe expanded from a very high-density and high-temperature state.
There are entirely separate theories to explain how that matter, after it arose, interacts with itself to give rise to chemistry. Then there is the origin of life, which is another problem. And then we get to evolution, which is how the initial life modified itself to become the species we have today. And then we have a bunch of other theories that explain how the brain operates.
Any one of these theories could be wrong, but that wouldn't invalidate any of the other ones. Some of them we have much more data and certainty on then others. But the only people that talk as if they were the same thing are creationists, not scientists.
The idea that consciousness comes first has been known as in eastern philosophy as non-dualism (advaita vedanta) -- everything is consciousness. The basic idea is that it is impossible to experience anything outside of our consciousness--thus any assumption there is something outside of consciousness is just that -- an assumption or belief. We can theorize, we can argue, but it will always remain a belief, because it's not possible to experience anything outside of consciousness.
I'd like to share Rupert Spira, a modern non-dualist teacher that holds this view-point. Here is one video in which he explains the consciousness-first approach to someone, a scientist, who holds to the materialist approach: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qgcfa0LFKXc
Perhaps someone will find it interesting and peruse some of his other videos, which I find very enlightening.
I think the controversy of consciousness arises from (and is deeply tied to) the history of Western philosophy and science: the "death of God", matter/spirit and mind/body duality. Something that's not widely acknowledged is how Indian philosophy (Hindu, Buddhist) had significant influence in the course of that history.
A major assumption of the currently dominant worldview is that there's no God, spirit, and even "mind" is questionable. Everything must be explainable as physics, and layers above like mechanics, chemistry, biology. Psychology as a field - in the "West", which is basically a global culture now - is based on that assumption.
The word "consciousness" is so ill-defined and the concept so misunderstood, mainly because it's mixed up with ideas of free will, mind, spirit - the animating principle. It's just the most modern term for categorizing and trying to understand a class of phenomena.
Seeing how "consciousness studies" is widely considered a pseudo-science, I suspect that it's actually related to some critical "flaw" in the fundamentals of the modern worldview, the assumption of a completely physical universe - "physical" meaning consistent with the science of physics.
What's fascinating for me is how quantum mechanics and its philosophical speculations about the role of the observer seems to be causing a paradigm shift, which is taking decades (almost a century) to sink in. We seem to be redefining consciousness as a fundamental property of physics, with some even theorizing that consciousness plays a role in bringing the universe into existence.
As a fan of both Indian philosophy and Western science, I'm greatly enjoying the battle of the ideas (often heated arguments and accusations of "woowoo" pseudo-scientific thinking), the struggle to understand the nature of consciousness deeply and rigorously, and the evolution of science and our worldviews.
> Everything must be explainable as physics, and layers above like mechanics, chemistry, biology. Psychology as a field - in the "West", which is basically a global culture now - is based on that assumption.
That's right. It's pretty amazing how much is based off of that assumption which has no realistic basis. I guess it's a "convenient" assumption.
But if we start to think that hey, maybe consciousness is the root of it all, not matter, then we can see why science doesn't understand consciousness at all: it's like trying to find the screen while studying the pictures on it. You can study all the biology, physics, and matter on the screen, but you won't find the screen in the details. In this analogy, consciousness is the "screen" in which all appears. I think mainstream science will shift MASSIVELY once they start looking into as a legitimate possibility.
> thus any assumption there is something outside of consciousness is just that
I've also watched the video you linked to. His argument is indeed strong, but the scientist was rather weak. They (seemed to) agree that experience is mediated by our physical bodies (brains). So did the universe (matter) exist when there was no evolved consciousness to observe it? If the matter did not exist before the mind, how did we come to be?
Yes, our whole world could be somebody's dream or we could be "brains in the vat", but then the question is only changed to "who is dreaming or maintaining the vat"? And since we cannot observe the dreamer, does he exist?
> The basic idea is that it is impossible to experience anything outside of our consciousness
Often in a crowded work environment people will be taking and yet I will have no conscious awareness of what they are saying. Yet, the second they mention my name, my attention will snap to what they are saying.
Clearly there is some unconscious (and yet intelligent and aware) part of me that is experiencing reality, just waiting for the right trigger to alert my consciousness to some important development.
Like sutterbomb said, focus isn't exactly the consciousness we're talking about here. Although clearly if your name hadn't entered your consciousness you wouldn't have noticed it :)
The question of focus is pretty interesting to me, though. It seems that we are consciousness that gets to "decide" where to put our attention. There are a ton of things that can attract our attention, all through the mechanisms created by the consciousness, namely the five physical senses, our thoughts, and feelings.
I thought it was fascinating as I read the thesis statement that over two hundred years later we still haven't left Immanuel Kant's orbit. The author ended the article citing Kant's proposition that space and time belong to the mind rather than as properties of external reality however Kant directly answers her question, paraphrasing, "What is it that lends perception the power of perceiving", to which Kant answers with a technical term, original apperception, which more concretely means that the structure of consciousness, no matter its belonging to subjectivity (so-called empirical apperception, your spontaneous sense of selfhood), is itself objective (those terms are actually one in Kant, universal === necessary). There are readings of Kant to go further and suggest that math, by extension, must be the descriptor of anything that can exist therefore.
Interesting enough, the grandfather of the modern Left, Michel Foucault, spent a considerable amount of his career trying to dislodge Kant's claim before coming upon the realization that power informs our perceptions.
In order to understand Kant, first read David Hume's Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Kant's major ideas are entirely a response to this essay (we English-speakers are lucky to have this crucial piece of the Enlightenment in our native tongue). Hume argues that cause and effect are entirely empirical concepts, which has the implication that we can't actually talk about "eternal laws of nature" with any sense. Kant wrote The Critique of Pure Reason and his subsequent critiques in the trilogy to argue that the laws of nature are laws because they are the laws of our ability to experience subjectivity at all. The Critique is very dense and technically written and the English translations do little to abate this. I would recommend reading it with a companion commentary text though unfortunately that wasn't the path I'd taken so I can't pick out a specific one.
Not the user you replied to, but there's no harm (and in my judgement great benefit) from diving right into Kant, or more generally, German idealism - so Kant, Fichte, Schelling and Hegel. Marx is also worth visiting for his "Hegelian" materialism (in this case opposed to idealism). That'll provide the basics to know what Foucault was talking about.
The Cambridge Companion to German Idealism (I forget which year) is also highly recommended though I haven't looked into that myself.
What about people that have a distaste for authority? Would this distrust dissolve how power informs our perceptions?
Is there something in the transition period in the teenage years that also sets the foundation of perceptions? I ask because that is a time it seems where we take the most risks and question everything.
Disagreement is shaped as much by power as agreement, because in both cases you accept the framing of what gets discussed posed by the people in power. Truly claiming that power for yourself requires breaking out of the frame entirely and directing your attention where you want it.
For example, public educators have near-absolute power over K-12 students in the U.S. Many students rebel against this (I certainly did), and do things like argue about homework or refuse to go to class. But that accepts the educators' power as legitimate; if it weren't, you wouldn't bother to rebel against it! Someone truly intent on seizing power for themselves would devote the minimum amount of effort and attention to pleasing his teachers, and then go off and write a machine-learning based MP3 player that he can go sell to Microsoft for a million dollars.
Distrust of authority does not change the fact that power informs our perceptions.
Imagine trying to have a conversation in a loud room. You struggle to hear the person you're conversing with. The loudness of the room informs your perception of the conversation. You might not enjoy the loud room, but it's nonetheless there. And your frustration with the loud room is probably affecting your responses to the conversation.
This article begs the question of our conciousness not being a physical process which is cool I guess If your peddling thoughts from a dualist from over a century ago. I still have no reason however, not to believe our conciousness doesn't arise from the physical configuration and other processes therein related. To paraphrase "Science cant talk about this purely in physic terms." No, Science simply hasn't FOUND the way to talk about it in physical terms which I personally believe in time we will. To be absolutely fair, as you may have noticed I'm in the camp of people who think Kant is largely garbage so I'm have a natural bias against works using his thought on the matter.
Your assumption that consciousness is only physical is merely that - another assumption. It proves nothing, and claiming otherwise begs the question.
The problem is that all scientific results around the consciousness question derive from what people report about their personal experience. There's no other known way to answer any questions about consciousness, and science hasn't discovered any way to answer questions about the immaterial.
Hence, from a scientific perspective, it's not a question for which an answer can be deduced from observation -- so questions about it are left to philosophical inquiry (reasoning inductively from first principles, instead of deductively from observation) or religion-based worldviews (which can be coherently accepted/rejected based on their correspondence to reality and internal consistency).
Science is better then this. We don't need to directly observe something, it's OK to be able to just indirectly observe.
So, let's assume that consciousness is only physical. What would be the implications of that? It would imply that other physical objects can interact with it. We see plenty of evidence of that, with victims of brain damage, or when using drugs.
Now, to assume that consciousness is not physical, not only you need a mechanism for it to interact with our physical world (since it can order our bodies to do stuff) but also for the physical world to act on it.
Hence, from a scientific perspective, it seems pretty clear that consciousness is physical.
> The problem is that all scientific results around the consciousness question derive from what people report about their personal experience.
There are also correspondence tests between experience and behaviour.
> There's no other known way to answer any questions about consciousness, and science hasn't discovered any way to answer questions about the immaterial.
Because there's no such thing in science. If it's observable, then it will be absorbed into a scientific explanation. If it's not observable, then it must obtain by logical necessity, or it might as well not exist.
The problem with the religion-based worldviews is that it opens us up to a vast amount of made up believes and leads to a huge variety of different axioms that become undebatable and completely mess up or public discourse. I think it's vastly preferable to just accept that we don't know the answer to some questions, rather than making something up.
Personal experience still counts as evidence. If you get a lot of different people reporting the same stuff then that’s a pretty solid indication that there’s some common basis for it.
From this, we know that the physical world affects consciousness in many ways. You can change its perceptions with alcohol. You can make it hallucinate with LSD. You can stop it entirely by applying force to the brain.
So either consciousness is physical or it is non-physical but somehow connected bidirectionally to the physical world. If it’s the latter, in what way is it actually non-physical? If there is some way in which it’s non-physical, shouldn’t that manifest as something that makes it act differently from physical objects? Some force that doesn’t perturb it or some attribute that remains constant when you’d expect it to change?
One reason to prefer the physical-causes-consciousness route is that it gives a fairly clear way to try to answer the question: investigate the physical. We'll know if we have useful answers when we can manipulate it / create a consciousness.
We don't currently have a clear direction to go to get answers. That's normal, and it doesn't at all imply that there is no direction. And while we investigate the physical, we get more side benefits, like better and better medications / treatments / tools / etc.
If consciousness is "something else", how do we make progress towards understanding it? What can we do with that information?
> it's not a question for which an answer can be deduced from observation
Another assumption. Throughout history, again and again, science has discovered ways to answer questions, and when science finally arrives, it brings the "final" answer since no other method can compete. Haven't we learned this lesson yet? Why is consciousness the final bastion ?
Of course, philosophizing on issues like the OP article is incredibly valuable. After all, science is just philosophy with extra steps.
I challenge the assertion that something immaterial (other than information) is at play here.
Consciousnesses as we experiment it is exactly what would appear if you were to instruct an intelligent system into thinking it had a subjective "I".
My theory is that consciousness is what appears when your mind theories (your model of other people's mind) become elaborate enough that you need to embed in them a model of your own mind into the model of their mind (aka "how do they see me" ?).
Once you reach that point, you have the ability of having a model of your own mind superimposed on your own perceptions. You also have your animal brain shouting to you that survival is essential and that you are unique (which are obvious beneficial traits to have) and lets your rational mind rationalize as it can.
Consciousness is just the (limited) ability to introspect your thoughts and model an "I". There is nothing happening there that can't be explained through information processing.
> Science simply hasn't FOUND [...] I personally believe in time we will
Lets call that Scientism. Beliefs about what may be discovered later are just beliefs, something that should be considered anathema to science itself. (Of course these beliefs may or may not come true, and curiosity about them may indeed provide insight that allows their eventual discovery.)
But in the meantime unfounded beliefs may indeed hamper further scientific insight and discoveries. Ironic, given the history of science & faith, that science might be stymied by limitations of its own faith.
> No, Science simply hasn't FOUND the way to talk about it in physical terms which I personally believe in time we will.
Sure, but that's a largely useless belief.
People don't put enough value on the usefulness of a belief. They seem to think it is all about what is true from a data perspective, but truth is only valuable as both thought AND action, with emphasis on action over thought. Example:
- If you think gravity exists but don't behave as if it exists, you're gonna have a bad time because you will probably fall off a cliff, even though you're right about gravity in theory.
- If you don't think that gravity exists, but still behave as if gravity exists, you'll be alright because you won't fall off a cliff, even though you're wrong about gravity in theory.
If dualist thinking helps someone achieve the goals of a psychologist or therapist, then dualist thinking is more valuable than just waiting around for science to fill a gap it may never fill. And just because someone adopts a dualist perspective today doesn't mean they can't reject it tomorrow. There's no rule saying you have to believe the same thing your entire life. So if science comes up with a better explanation, the dualists can adapt then.
Science hasn't found or even begin to find a way to talk about this.
It's not like a physicist looking at an amoeba. That's a very complicated physical system, but it seems obvious that each of the parts can be progressively broken down into the fundamental physical forces and particles.
Consciousness....we can't even begin to talk about that in a fundamental physical way. The operation of the brain? Sure. But as far as we know, you could have an otherwise identical brain/computer firing circuits, producing actions, etc
without consciousness. Which gets to the heart of the issue: we have no way to observe consciousness outside our own.
> But as far as we know, you could have an otherwise identical brain/computer firing circuits, producing actions, etc without consciousness.
We don't know that at all. Can you describe how that would be like? Would a person with no consciousness not talk about their own consciousness? But talking about the self is an action. It seems pretty clear that the reason brains talk about their consciousness is their consciousness.
The building blocks of this universe are "things" vibrating. That is all I know.
Consciousness is a very tricky problem. I often question what happens when a man loses his "mind". Is the being now just a machine with stored memory which responds to stimuli?
What happens when a person loses his memory? What role does consciousness play in this scenario?
How do we let split personality disorder and consciousness to play together?
Also, I look around and see the geometry of flowers and seeds. Geometry that emanates from the universe. Everything that looks chaotic at one level becomes extremely beautiful and organized at another.
Also, I see that everything is terribly interconnected. If we think deeply enough we can easily see that a stone lying outside and us are all the same as far as building blocks are concerned. The stone is not an unnecessary object, but our existence and the stone's existence are inextricable.
The universe, whatever is visible to me, is absolutely too grand and too well engineered to not have some sort of intelligence working behind it.
Not much intelligent about gravity coalescing matter.
But that had the side effect of releasing atomic energy in the form of stars. The rubble attracted by these stars, orbited till it coalesced itself into planets.
Those planets are bombarded by atomic energy by stars. Chemical reactions happened to break down this energy. Life, aka chemical reactions that are able to persist, started happening as a side effect.
The more robust and more intelligent reactions were able to persist through fluctuations in environment. ie. ice ages, meteors, etc.
We are nothing more than a persistent, stubborn reaction. A fungus on a hot rock. Maybe someday we can send some spores to another hot rock, and continue our fungal infestation. Provided that we don't consume all the resources here before that happens and fizzle out. In any case, I'm sure there is a fungus, perhaps a more evolved one, somewhere else in the universe that will.
The brain is connected to the gut via the vagus nerve. It's possible that humans are just a vehicle for bacteria to more quickly and interact with their environment in a more substantial way in a similar way that human use cars as a vehicle. I feel like I am an individual with my own consciousness, but it's possible it is all one shared consciousness by a super network of bacteria
> The universe, whatever is visible to me, is absolutely too grand and too well engineered to not have some sort of intelligence working behind it.
I think everyone can appreciate this viewpoint, but it's an emotional, visceral reaction to size- and timescales that are literally incomprehensible to the human mind. The complexities of nature engage one's sense of awe and strongly suggest the existence of an intelligent agent in some people, but this belief says nothing about whether that's actually true.
I understand the point the author wants to make, but I think they fail to make it.
As an example, the idea that "there could be a mind that eats food but doesn't taste it" is silly. We were always going to evolve a way to "scan" food for it's properties. It just makes evolutionary sense. The more information the better. Not to mention the reward aspect (there is some reward for doing everything that contributes to survivial). Of course food tastes good.
Another example the author uses "red looks red" is equally unconsidered. It's a mental representation of light. There are evolutionary reasons for being able to distinguish colors, and they have to be represented mentally somehow. Why doesn't it look like blue? Who cares? All that matters is that it has a distinct representation.
Also in the article, the "why do rotten eggs smell bad" example... Because sulfurous compounds are the result of the metabolic processes of various bacteria. Because those bacteria are present in rotting things, which can cause illness, we have evolved to find them repellent.
Why are my experiences different from others? Because that's just how biological organisms beyond a certain complexity work. No two are alike.
A similarly obvious explanation exists for every example in the article. I see no compelling case that experience cannot be described through biological processes or that consciousness didn't arise from complexity.
I'm not saying there aren't interesting mysteries where consciousness is concerned, just that this article seems to completely fail to explore them.
I’m not sure of the point you’re making. The point is it’s entirely possible to conceive of a complex biological agent that can take actions on the basis of sensory input data without invoking the need for a subjective experience. That would be the ‘philosophical zombie’ described by David Chalmers.
However we have a subjective experience of what it ‘feels like’ to see red. Why is that needed?
Any agent which has the ability to perceive red must have some mechanism which corresponds to that percept. The percept of red has to be different to other percepts so that it is not mistaken for something that is not red. It is subjective because the agent has no mechanism for objective experience.
I think to conceive of a philosophical zombie, you have to say that consciousness is something uniquely special in that something possessing all its describing qualities is not it.
What reason is there to believe that subjective experience doesn't arise from the complex web of perceptions, sensations, neurochemical interactions and cognition that we call "I"?
It seems to me that the properties of consciousness would naturally follow from any generally intelligent system. An intelligent agent must be aware of phenomena in its environment, it must be able to distinguish phenomena (qualia), its experience is subjective to the extent of the limitations of its connectivity.
> The problem is that there could conceivably be brains that perform all the same sensory and decision-making functions as ours but in which there is no conscious experience.
I think before this can be said to be a problem, it should be explained how such a brain (with human-like intelligence) can exist without mechanisms corresponding to the properties of consciousness.
To me it seems obvious that any intelligent living thing that has some level of intelligence would be conscious... as in take in sensory data, is aware of it's environment, and can make decisions based on that.
But I would even argue that most living things above a certain neuron count are conscious. I think it's really flawed to assume that only we as humans have an awareness of self and are "conscious".
I don't see the distinction between my awareness of myself and my environment, and that of my dog for example. He is aware of himself, has ideas and acts on them, interacts with his world consciously. It's as if humans are grasping for some sort of uniqueness in nature. If you were a robot with sensors and cameras fed into a generally intelligent neural network. You wouldn't see a display of the data on a hud. You would be consciously immersed in the data. You would be the neural network. You would have an awareness of your environment, and you would be conscious of your existence in it.
I think consciousness is evolutionary. It allows living things to want to survive and preserve what they are. I think without consciousness a creature wouldn't have the strong drive for survival. In my opinion, it's what makes you long to continue your existence.
This is almost exactly what I would have written so thanks. It too me a lifetime while to combat my childhood bias to arrive at this point. And now I feel like a lot of people have to similarly overcome their own internal bias and realize that consciousness isn't all that special. We search for intelligent life with out in space but intelligent conscious life surrounds us.
I think the particular shape of normal human consciousness is a product of evolution, but I don't think consciousness itself is. People can experience altered states of consciousness which can be detrimental to their survival such as psychosis, disassociation, alexithymia (inability to perceive emotions of oneself and others), and aphantasia (inability to create mental imagery). Additionally some psychologists theorise that consciousness / intelligence is in fact a liability to survival because it allows us to ideate suicide as a solution to negative feelings, and that we have had to evolve mitigations to prevent this.
The problem I have with this is that you can then claim that anything and everything is conscious.
Create a turing machine out of marbles and levers, and it's suddenly "conscious" with the right configuration. You really believe that given enough space, a bunch of marbles running along tracks bouncing off levers can become aware that it is a giant marble machine?
The atoms in one pocket of the sun's chaotic fusion reaction might randomly and momentarily behave like an intelligent quantum computer - does that mean the sun is momentarily conscious from time to time?
Your comment got me thinking so I'm going to ramble a bit. The sun being conscious makes sense to me. Not as we are, but then again nothing is as we are. Cats communicate with each other, cleverly explore and learn about their environment but they aren't conscience like us.
Growing up, my vocabulary advanced waaay faster than my experience. I learned what the word "nostalgia" was well before I first felt nostalgic. In fact, I remember feeling it a few times about summers with friends that had moved before connecting the feeling with the word. It was a slap on forehead moment. I concluded that nostalgia was an inbuilt "thing", everyone else probably experienced it in the same way. It's easy for me to consider nostalgia as just an inbuilt reaction to a certain kind of signal. (Something periodic that makes you feel good, then it stops. Recalling the period creates a bittersweet feeling).
The space between consciousness and inanimate intuitively feels to me like a gradient. Various levels of brain damage might yield someone unresponsive to speech but responsive to pain. Then there are people who feel no pain, but otherwise are completely normal.
Therefore, I'd put on the lower end of the consciousness scale "reacting to changes" the more changes something reacts to, and the more varied their reactions, the more conscious it is. We're talking things between the sun and single celled organisms. Single cells don't seem to do much rumination, but they get hungry.
Advanced consciousness seems to require heritable lessons and skills. A feral human that somehow survived alone on an island from birth wouldn't be conscious like the rest of us are, but I bet it would still feel nostalgia if its favorite berry went extinct.
I'm comfortable ascribing feelings to things with full knowledge they aren't feeling it like we are. I bet red giant stars feel fat and old.
> Create a turing machine out of marbles and levers, and it's suddenly "conscious" with the right configuration. You really believe that given enough space, a bunch of marbles running along tracks bouncing off levers can become aware that it is a giant marble machine?
This is just defamiliarization. It's an excessively common belief that a computer with the right inputs, outputs, and software could realize that it is itself a computer program. The same software on a marble machine would be a lot harder to hook up to useful sensors, and would be too large to be at all practical, but it's the same thing.
Since you happened to use marbles as the analogy, I think you may find "I am a strange loop"[1] and the concept of simmballs and the careenium[2] interesting.
> The problem I have with this is that you can then claim that anything and everything is conscious.
The thing would have to have correlates of consciousness; mechanisms which perform the properties which constitute conscious thought. I see no reason why such a mechanism could not be created by such general machinery as a marble run, albeit a very large one. The sun however is a chaotic ball of plasma, so I can't see how it could play home to an arbitrary complex mechanism.
Consciousness is something separate from environmental awareness. Consciousness is what you have that lets you observe yourself carrying out the actions you are all while thinking yourself to be the one running the show, even though its entirely possible your behavior is not really "yours" to control, but the processes of your body and mind. In other words the 'thing' inside of you that's along for the ride of one quite immersive movie, is what consciousness is.
When you write a program to determine a pseudo-random number, I doubt there's any person that would seriously indulge the possibility that in that moment some entity puffs into existence, imagines itself picking a number, and then puffs back out of existence. But if this is true it makes any path towards artificial consciousness require some rather extensive handwaving and speculation that is not logically justifiable based on what we currently know.
Hold up, Is this thread being inundated by a religious group or something?
Where is the rational thought behind this consciousness discussion? If all of you "critical thinkers" are really responding with "You just don't want to accept that consciousness can't be explained with science" then I have lost my last remaining bit of hope in humanity's intelligence.
Claiming that science cannot explain consciousness is not "religious" or "irrational", it simply is going back to what science is, namely, that "ideas are tested by experiment". Science as we understand it today cannot really explain consciousness, the same way it cannot really explain what it feels like to be a bat. It can explain how bat's use senses perceive environment using physical principles of sound transmission, but it can't convey what bats feel when they perceive environment. Similarly, I cannot convey my internal conscious experiences to you. I can only try to describe them to make you interpret them in terms of your own conscious experiences, but I can never make you feel what I feel, or if I can, there's no way to tell that.
Of course, in future we might understand things like consciousness and qualia, and it's likely that people who do it will be scientists. It won't be "science" though as we understand it today, it will necessarily have to be something bigger. Let's call it "science+".
And, of course, just because science can't explain consciousness doesn't mean that religion can. It can certainly claim to be able to do it, but will be as convincing as the religion is at explaining everything else.
Science cant explain a lot of things, but it has a habit of not introducing needless entities in order to explain them away. There is a certain sense in which those ‘belief based’ entities are qualitatively similar to religious mythology.
Define consciousness in a way such that it can, even theoretically, be objectively measured.
If it cannot be so defined, then it cannot be explained within an empirical framework, or "science" if you insist, by definition. Empiricism requires objective measurement. The kind of consciousness people are talking about, the experience of being, cannot be objectively measured because it is a purely subjective concept.
If you want to talk purely about ideas that exist within an empirical framework, then you're talking about things like minds and brains, complexity of interactions, etc. All objectively measurable and perfectly scientific things.
But that isn't what people are talking about, because it isn't interesting. Because when you get right down to it what people really want to know is how badly we're allowed to treat things. If it isn't "conscious", then we need not concern ourselves over its apparent suffering need we?
Something is up. I haven’t seen this much scientific woo and pseudo-philosophical nonsense on HN at one time before. Unless this is a part of the community I’ve never noticed before.I think I’ve read at least 3 posts that end in “because quantum physics”.
There are two broad categories of comments that you've conflated together into an "irrational" label. The first is grounded in mystical woo-woo, and the second is grounded in philosophy of science (meta-science) and philosophy of mind.
I do think that "consciousness likely can't be explained by science" if you take science to mean the scientific method and models produced by it, and not just "rational thought" which I would argue is not the same thing.
Science at its core is a series of predictive models and they don't tell you how things "are" (whatever that means), but rather how things behave within some error bound. On the one hand I can see how it's dangerous to cast any sort of criticism in scientific results and theorems especially when they've been well established, but that doesn't mean they are "facts" or universal, only that they've withstood repeated criticism quite well.
The problem that this article is talking about is that you can't observe experience (consciousness) like you can observe "physical" phenomena, so you can't use the same sort of tools like you would use for conducting other sorts of science.
You obviously approach any intelligent discussion in consciousness with rational thought, and the people you can take seriously in this field do just that.
If you're interested in reading more about this I can point you to resources, which should probably start with Chalmer's "Hard problem of consciousness".
I'm also a bit confused here. It seems that a lot of the commentors here have either not read the article posted at all, or are intentionally trying to manipulate the HN comments so as to confound any future ML algos with what amounts to jibberish and noise. There seems to be an inordinate amount of people talking past each other and calling each other names (or something similarly in bad faith). I may just be tricking myself though and seeing things that are not out of place in any other thread.
Philosophers of mind still insist on metaphysical descriptions of consciousness Eventhough there is so much progress in neuroscience that makes it hard to take it seriously anymore. Afaik, most young neuroscientists abstain from these endlessly-goal-shifting discussions. Its a pity too because with recent progress in deep learning there couldnt be a more exciting time to do mind philosophy
(You should have realized that HN has been infiltrated a long time ago)
You're forgetting that Silicon Valley is saturated with new age beliefs and other woo. Just because someone's smart and is good with computers doesn't make them any less susceptible.
Right, it's the classic "God of the gaps". People invested in some kind of faith latch onto areas not yet explained by science. This relies on the false belief that if something isn't explained by science, then there's an opportunity for faith to provide value (aka faith is needed to provide an explanation).
But the many worlds interpretation is also a sort of gap-plugging, unfalsifiable argument to me. With it, no need to actually explain why the universe is one way or another: all the possibilities exist in different worlds.
I think people delude themselves that science, at least as currently practised, is always objective.
Readit News
We may get there. Read something about how vision works from a century ago, when nobody had a clue. The first real progress came from "What the Frog's Eye Tells the Frog's Brain" (1959).[1] That was the beginning of understanding visual perception, and the very early days of neural network technology. Now we have lots of systems doing visual perception moderately well. There's been real progress.
(I went through Stanford CS at the peak of the 1980s expert system boom. Back then, people there were way too much into asking questions like this. "Does a rock have intentions?" was an exam question. The "AI winter" followed. AI finally got unstuck 20 years later when the machine learning people and their "shut up and calculate" approach started working.)
[1] https://hearingbrain.org/docs/letvin_ieee_1959.pdf
I realize this could be true for a lot of other schools of thought, but it seemed especially prominent when arguments about what makes a person seem to rely on a lower-level assumption of how the brain works.
What's left as "philosophy" is always the stuff where we don't even really know what questions to ask. So we kick them around for a few centuries, or millennia, in the hopes that something will eventually take on a shape that can be pursued in a better-defined fashion.
EDIT: Some links to the new tools mentioned:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nb07TLkJ3Ww (optogenetics)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UKbrwPL3wXE (crispr-cas9)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L3bSx4TBs6M (clarity)
> The real answer is that we don't yet know enough about how the brain works...
I don't think the "problem of consciousness" is one of missing empirical evidence so much as simply a fuzzy (ill-posed?) question. Though enough evidence might be sufficient to forcefully dissolve an irreal question. On the flipside, a lot of the current ML research does a good job at addressing consciousness by breaking it into concrete, communicable actions.
Instead of asking, "What is consciousness?" try asking, "What actions could XYZ take that would convince me it's conscious?" A related question is "What actions (in minute detail) are involved as I believe/think/feel I'm conscious?" Those two questions are similar, but tend to evoke quite different sets of "external" experiences and actions.
It might turn out that there is some mathematically invariant property of things that are capable of acting as convincing conscious agents, a la the physically precise definition of heat turning out to behave kind of like a phlogiston. In such a case, we might in fact find a "thing" that deserves the label "consciousness"---such as Hofstadter's idea of a strange loop---but for now I think the term is used pretty much used in a way that's synonymous with "magic".
I think we can define a generalized version of what we call a "conscious thought" as a thought that can be "consciously reflected" about. With "conscious reflection" I mean using some representation of the thought as an input for another thought in such a way that the new thought, including the usage of the original thought, can be used as an input for another thought in the same way. The representation doesn't have to correspond particularly closely to the execution. (We remember to think in natural language, but maybe the thought process is just converted into natural language after the fact for the purpose of saving and reflecting.)
Computer programs can also be conscious according to this generalized definition if the process of executing it is saved in some way and can, depending on the circumstances, be used in some way, which is saved in the same way.
That different "ways" of using a thought as an input for another thought are possible means that there can be different consciousnesses in our brain. One of them (if there are multiple), which is the one responsible for our output, at least on a higher level, or does at least significantly inform the output, is what we call "my consciousness". The reason why we don't know whether "my consciousness" is responsible for the output, despite having the appearance, is that it may be mostly a "post-hoc rationalization engine" for decisions made on another level, possibly for other reasons. But it does at least inform the output, since thoughts of "my consciousness" in the past inform our later output. For example, if we are asked about our past thoughts, we talk about the ones that are remembered in "my consciousness". This is the thing that puts it in such a special position compared to other hypothetical consciousnesses, which don't inform our output in this way, and are therefore invisible to other people, and obviously also to "my consciousness".
I wasn't aware ML had anything to do with consciousness.
> In such a case, we might in fact find a "thing" that deserves the label "consciousness"---such as Hofstadter's idea of a strange loop---but for now I think the term is used pretty much used in a way that's synonymous with "magic".
So you consider your experiences of color, taste, pleasure, etc. to be akin to "magic"? Because those sensations are what make up our conscious experiences.
What does a good answer to this question look like in this context? Genuinely curious what they were looking for.
Imo the real question is whether humans have intentions. It seems like if you look at it rationally, we're just collections of chemicals reacting with each other. Set the initial conditions and then the whole thing is deterministic. It's pretty uncomfortable to think this though, so I think it's best if we avoid the subject.
Imagine you are on a rollercoaster: you know your course is pre-determined, but you can't see too far ahead, and it sure is a fun and surprising ride along the way.
If quantum physics theories are correct than there's always some amount of pure randomness in the game, making it impossible to create perfectly deterministic and repeatable system of any significant complexity.
This reminds me of Sam Harris' book "Freewill", I recommend it to the people who believe in freewill.
By the way, what determines the whole chain of deterministic events?
But there's just nothing that I recall in that book that suggests or even hints at any reason for this to result in a subjective experience. And I don't believe it rules out an electron having a nano-unit of subjective experience, for example.
The book suggests that something is a subjective experience if an organism can report it as one, and goes to great detail about what's going on in the brain when an organism is able to report a subjective experience, and makes the very reasonable suggestion that something is probably a subjective experience in a brained organism that can't report it as one so long as it exhibits all the same patterns in that organism's brain (infants, other animals).
But I don't think it does any work at all to show that there is no subjective experience in plants, or rocks, or even nano-units of subjective experience in individual electrons. It can't do this, because, as far as I recall, there is simply no progress on the problem of why this global activation in the brain would produce a subjective experience.
If we imagine there's a God and I could ask any 1 question about the brain and get an anaswer, all I would need to ask is:
"Hey God: w.r.t. the human brain, are there any special shenanigans like is connected to a soul that's responsible for consciousness, or is it WYSIWYG, just a bunch of cells and that's it?"
Luckily for you, there is no God and I can answer definitively: no, there are no shenanigans. It's just some cells and that's it. I am telling you this definitively. There are no metaphysical shenanigans going on in the human brain.
Note: you might wonder why, for this answer, I decided to phrase it in terms of asking God. The answer is in order to activate the natural scientist's reaction "that's silly, God can't tell you there's no God like that". Well, brain metaphysics is exactly and equally silly. It's just some cells, that's all.
Isn't it the other way round, though?
They were twiddling their thumbs back then because they had no other option. There was no way to do machine learning back then. I've played with perceptrons on '90s hardware and it was basically just a toy.
And then Moore's law opened the flood gates some decades later.
It wasn't so much "thumb twiddling" though, there was a lot of work being done on systems which were more focused on knowledge representation (like Cyc [1], which still exists). Also a lot of work was being done from a more Psychological direction (mental models, scripts etc) and from a physical/neuro-science direction (brainz!).
These were all happening simultaneously and it wasn't clear (partly because of the MIPS issue you mention) that ML was the winning pony (for now) and I still appreciate the broad spectrum of knowledge covered in my particular Cognitive Science program.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyc
And don't forget Minsky's decimation of neural network research at the start of the 1970s [1], which led to major research centers like MIT ignoring them completely.
[1] https://www.edge.org/response-detail/26629
[1] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/200033859_Parallel_...
My first thought: Depends on if the rock is magnetized.
It's equally clear that most of what we associate with consciousness, such as thinking, awareness of the body and the moment and time and decision making and ... doesn't exist either. Because time and time again studies prove that when a decision is made (this is well studied in traffic for instance) there are no conscious reasons. Reasons only happen afterwards.
Is it therefore such a stretch to say that consciousness simply doesn't exist until long after the fact, and it is only once we ask one of these bags of mostly water to explain themselves (or ... well when we ask them something) that any trace of consciousness, at least the way humans understand it, is actually forthcoming ?
Consciousness is a trick. A learned trick. Human minds are not conscious and it is most definitely not a certainty that they, even when born fully formed and healthy that they will become conscious (read the reports on children raised by animals. They are old, sometimes 20 years old and they most definitely aren't conscious, not even on the level that a primate is conscious. The 12 year old boy they found in the wild in France never learned to speak only to articulate 2 words).
This is weird, because this is not most humans experience. Everyone around them always had consciousness. But let's compare. Everybody who has kids realizes that memory, firstly, isn't actually memory. We are very much not storing events when they happen in our brain. We learn a trick, because our parents keep referring to our past and "what we've done". We learn to calculate back from our current state of mind to what happened before.
That and of course philosophers have a millennium or 3 of history of ... philosophers getting consciousness wrong. Consciousness has been accepted in history to be being religious, to being able to rhyme, to composing music, to being able to talk and explain ourselves, to being able to love, to convince a professor (via chat) that you are conscious, to solve problems (all kinds), to walk around, to play chess, to ... all of these are now of course considered wrong. Why ? Mostly because things that definitely aren't conscious, from little dumb tricks, even mechanical contraptions in some cases, to rule based engines, to deep learning and now reinforcement learning algorithms can do this.
So can we please just conclude that whatever this article claims is ... wrong ? Just wrong. Nothing of value, other than perhaps interest a few people for stories with enough alcohol present. The current consensus seems to be that more details will be forthcoming the first time a reinforcement learning algorithm gets far enough to explain it's actions. So you want to know more ? Start there.
However, I think the article is simply suggesting to invert this assumption about physical reality. It proposes that for something to be "out there", you first need an "in here" (rather than afterwards), i.e. an experiencing of forms. This would be consciousness. At this point we are not even talking about decision making, thinking, memory, intellectual pursuits... Just subjective experience. So everything you're taking into the discussion regarding how thinking and decision making and memory happens is really a bridge further; not immediately relevant to the point the author is making.
I understand if this line of reasoning feels uncomfortable. You were literally pleading people to think that this is wrong. I think that is a mistake. There is value in challenging your assumptions, even if only philosophical with ethical/moral ramifications.
Since a person can tell what they experience and what they do not, the distinction between conscious experience and unconscious processing must have a base in physical reality (brain activity). With sufficiently advanced technology, one could analyze the brain processes and see which processes are associated with the reported conscious experience.
The fact that not all brain activity is associated with conscious experience in no way implies that conscious experience does not exist.
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And how exactly does that back calculation happen?
Didn't all organic life arise from inorganic molecular structures like rocks?
As a result of the theory of the big bang, molecular structures have progressively evolved in complexity, eventually becoming so complex that the boundaries of physics and chemistry are transcended into biology, life, and consciousness.
This suggests that "rocks" -- inorganic molecular structures -- indeed have "intentions" to the extent that they are primordial building blocks of consciousness
There are entirely separate theories to explain how that matter, after it arose, interacts with itself to give rise to chemistry. Then there is the origin of life, which is another problem. And then we get to evolution, which is how the initial life modified itself to become the species we have today. And then we have a bunch of other theories that explain how the brain operates.
Any one of these theories could be wrong, but that wouldn't invalidate any of the other ones. Some of them we have much more data and certainty on then others. But the only people that talk as if they were the same thing are creationists, not scientists.
Just because it's hard to define the lines between inorganic life, simple life, and sentient life, it doesn't mean there's no distinction.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuum_fallacy
The real question is not consciousness, but why the laws of physics are perfectly tuned for its existence.
I'd like to share Rupert Spira, a modern non-dualist teacher that holds this view-point. Here is one video in which he explains the consciousness-first approach to someone, a scientist, who holds to the materialist approach: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qgcfa0LFKXc
Perhaps someone will find it interesting and peruse some of his other videos, which I find very enlightening.
A major assumption of the currently dominant worldview is that there's no God, spirit, and even "mind" is questionable. Everything must be explainable as physics, and layers above like mechanics, chemistry, biology. Psychology as a field - in the "West", which is basically a global culture now - is based on that assumption.
The word "consciousness" is so ill-defined and the concept so misunderstood, mainly because it's mixed up with ideas of free will, mind, spirit - the animating principle. It's just the most modern term for categorizing and trying to understand a class of phenomena.
Seeing how "consciousness studies" is widely considered a pseudo-science, I suspect that it's actually related to some critical "flaw" in the fundamentals of the modern worldview, the assumption of a completely physical universe - "physical" meaning consistent with the science of physics.
What's fascinating for me is how quantum mechanics and its philosophical speculations about the role of the observer seems to be causing a paradigm shift, which is taking decades (almost a century) to sink in. We seem to be redefining consciousness as a fundamental property of physics, with some even theorizing that consciousness plays a role in bringing the universe into existence.
As a fan of both Indian philosophy and Western science, I'm greatly enjoying the battle of the ideas (often heated arguments and accusations of "woowoo" pseudo-scientific thinking), the struggle to understand the nature of consciousness deeply and rigorously, and the evolution of science and our worldviews.
That's right. It's pretty amazing how much is based off of that assumption which has no realistic basis. I guess it's a "convenient" assumption.
But if we start to think that hey, maybe consciousness is the root of it all, not matter, then we can see why science doesn't understand consciousness at all: it's like trying to find the screen while studying the pictures on it. You can study all the biology, physics, and matter on the screen, but you won't find the screen in the details. In this analogy, consciousness is the "screen" in which all appears. I think mainstream science will shift MASSIVELY once they start looking into as a legitimate possibility.
I've also watched the video you linked to. His argument is indeed strong, but the scientist was rather weak. They (seemed to) agree that experience is mediated by our physical bodies (brains). So did the universe (matter) exist when there was no evolved consciousness to observe it? If the matter did not exist before the mind, how did we come to be?
Yes, our whole world could be somebody's dream or we could be "brains in the vat", but then the question is only changed to "who is dreaming or maintaining the vat"? And since we cannot observe the dreamer, does he exist?
Often in a crowded work environment people will be taking and yet I will have no conscious awareness of what they are saying. Yet, the second they mention my name, my attention will snap to what they are saying.
Clearly there is some unconscious (and yet intelligent and aware) part of me that is experiencing reality, just waiting for the right trigger to alert my consciousness to some important development.
The question of focus is pretty interesting to me, though. It seems that we are consciousness that gets to "decide" where to put our attention. There are a ton of things that can attract our attention, all through the mechanisms created by the consciousness, namely the five physical senses, our thoughts, and feelings.
Interesting enough, the grandfather of the modern Left, Michel Foucault, spent a considerable amount of his career trying to dislodge Kant's claim before coming upon the realization that power informs our perceptions.
The Cambridge Companion to German Idealism (I forget which year) is also highly recommended though I haven't looked into that myself.
For example, public educators have near-absolute power over K-12 students in the U.S. Many students rebel against this (I certainly did), and do things like argue about homework or refuse to go to class. But that accepts the educators' power as legitimate; if it weren't, you wouldn't bother to rebel against it! Someone truly intent on seizing power for themselves would devote the minimum amount of effort and attention to pleasing his teachers, and then go off and write a machine-learning based MP3 player that he can go sell to Microsoft for a million dollars.
Imagine trying to have a conversation in a loud room. You struggle to hear the person you're conversing with. The loudness of the room informs your perception of the conversation. You might not enjoy the loud room, but it's nonetheless there. And your frustration with the loud room is probably affecting your responses to the conversation.
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The problem is that all scientific results around the consciousness question derive from what people report about their personal experience. There's no other known way to answer any questions about consciousness, and science hasn't discovered any way to answer questions about the immaterial.
Hence, from a scientific perspective, it's not a question for which an answer can be deduced from observation -- so questions about it are left to philosophical inquiry (reasoning inductively from first principles, instead of deductively from observation) or religion-based worldviews (which can be coherently accepted/rejected based on their correspondence to reality and internal consistency).
So, let's assume that consciousness is only physical. What would be the implications of that? It would imply that other physical objects can interact with it. We see plenty of evidence of that, with victims of brain damage, or when using drugs.
Now, to assume that consciousness is not physical, not only you need a mechanism for it to interact with our physical world (since it can order our bodies to do stuff) but also for the physical world to act on it.
Hence, from a scientific perspective, it seems pretty clear that consciousness is physical.
There are also correspondence tests between experience and behaviour.
> There's no other known way to answer any questions about consciousness, and science hasn't discovered any way to answer questions about the immaterial.
Because there's no such thing in science. If it's observable, then it will be absorbed into a scientific explanation. If it's not observable, then it must obtain by logical necessity, or it might as well not exist.
What does it mean for consciousness to be non-physical? If it is non-physical then it cannot have any impact on the physical world by definition.
From this, we know that the physical world affects consciousness in many ways. You can change its perceptions with alcohol. You can make it hallucinate with LSD. You can stop it entirely by applying force to the brain.
So either consciousness is physical or it is non-physical but somehow connected bidirectionally to the physical world. If it’s the latter, in what way is it actually non-physical? If there is some way in which it’s non-physical, shouldn’t that manifest as something that makes it act differently from physical objects? Some force that doesn’t perturb it or some attribute that remains constant when you’d expect it to change?
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We don't currently have a clear direction to go to get answers. That's normal, and it doesn't at all imply that there is no direction. And while we investigate the physical, we get more side benefits, like better and better medications / treatments / tools / etc.
If consciousness is "something else", how do we make progress towards understanding it? What can we do with that information?
Another assumption. Throughout history, again and again, science has discovered ways to answer questions, and when science finally arrives, it brings the "final" answer since no other method can compete. Haven't we learned this lesson yet? Why is consciousness the final bastion ?
Of course, philosophizing on issues like the OP article is incredibly valuable. After all, science is just philosophy with extra steps.
Consciousnesses as we experiment it is exactly what would appear if you were to instruct an intelligent system into thinking it had a subjective "I".
My theory is that consciousness is what appears when your mind theories (your model of other people's mind) become elaborate enough that you need to embed in them a model of your own mind into the model of their mind (aka "how do they see me" ?).
Once you reach that point, you have the ability of having a model of your own mind superimposed on your own perceptions. You also have your animal brain shouting to you that survival is essential and that you are unique (which are obvious beneficial traits to have) and lets your rational mind rationalize as it can.
Consciousness is just the (limited) ability to introspect your thoughts and model an "I". There is nothing happening there that can't be explained through information processing.
Lets call that Scientism. Beliefs about what may be discovered later are just beliefs, something that should be considered anathema to science itself. (Of course these beliefs may or may not come true, and curiosity about them may indeed provide insight that allows their eventual discovery.) But in the meantime unfounded beliefs may indeed hamper further scientific insight and discoveries. Ironic, given the history of science & faith, that science might be stymied by limitations of its own faith.
Sure, but that's a largely useless belief.
People don't put enough value on the usefulness of a belief. They seem to think it is all about what is true from a data perspective, but truth is only valuable as both thought AND action, with emphasis on action over thought. Example:
- If you think gravity exists but don't behave as if it exists, you're gonna have a bad time because you will probably fall off a cliff, even though you're right about gravity in theory.
- If you don't think that gravity exists, but still behave as if gravity exists, you'll be alright because you won't fall off a cliff, even though you're wrong about gravity in theory.
If dualist thinking helps someone achieve the goals of a psychologist or therapist, then dualist thinking is more valuable than just waiting around for science to fill a gap it may never fill. And just because someone adopts a dualist perspective today doesn't mean they can't reject it tomorrow. There's no rule saying you have to believe the same thing your entire life. So if science comes up with a better explanation, the dualists can adapt then.
Not really. It could be just a more fundamental kind of physical thing.
It's not like a physicist looking at an amoeba. That's a very complicated physical system, but it seems obvious that each of the parts can be progressively broken down into the fundamental physical forces and particles.
Consciousness....we can't even begin to talk about that in a fundamental physical way. The operation of the brain? Sure. But as far as we know, you could have an otherwise identical brain/computer firing circuits, producing actions, etc without consciousness. Which gets to the heart of the issue: we have no way to observe consciousness outside our own.
We don't know that at all. Can you describe how that would be like? Would a person with no consciousness not talk about their own consciousness? But talking about the self is an action. It seems pretty clear that the reason brains talk about their consciousness is their consciousness.
Consciousness is a very tricky problem. I often question what happens when a man loses his "mind". Is the being now just a machine with stored memory which responds to stimuli?
What happens when a person loses his memory? What role does consciousness play in this scenario?
How do we let split personality disorder and consciousness to play together?
Also, I look around and see the geometry of flowers and seeds. Geometry that emanates from the universe. Everything that looks chaotic at one level becomes extremely beautiful and organized at another.
Also, I see that everything is terribly interconnected. If we think deeply enough we can easily see that a stone lying outside and us are all the same as far as building blocks are concerned. The stone is not an unnecessary object, but our existence and the stone's existence are inextricable.
The universe, whatever is visible to me, is absolutely too grand and too well engineered to not have some sort of intelligence working behind it.
I do not know.
Not much intelligent about gravity coalescing matter.
But that had the side effect of releasing atomic energy in the form of stars. The rubble attracted by these stars, orbited till it coalesced itself into planets.
Those planets are bombarded by atomic energy by stars. Chemical reactions happened to break down this energy. Life, aka chemical reactions that are able to persist, started happening as a side effect.
The more robust and more intelligent reactions were able to persist through fluctuations in environment. ie. ice ages, meteors, etc.
We are nothing more than a persistent, stubborn reaction. A fungus on a hot rock. Maybe someday we can send some spores to another hot rock, and continue our fungal infestation. Provided that we don't consume all the resources here before that happens and fizzle out. In any case, I'm sure there is a fungus, perhaps a more evolved one, somewhere else in the universe that will.
I think everyone can appreciate this viewpoint, but it's an emotional, visceral reaction to size- and timescales that are literally incomprehensible to the human mind. The complexities of nature engage one's sense of awe and strongly suggest the existence of an intelligent agent in some people, but this belief says nothing about whether that's actually true.
People used to think that about, say, the origin of a lightning bolt. (Now we know for sure there is no "intelligence" behind it.)
As an example, the idea that "there could be a mind that eats food but doesn't taste it" is silly. We were always going to evolve a way to "scan" food for it's properties. It just makes evolutionary sense. The more information the better. Not to mention the reward aspect (there is some reward for doing everything that contributes to survivial). Of course food tastes good.
Another example the author uses "red looks red" is equally unconsidered. It's a mental representation of light. There are evolutionary reasons for being able to distinguish colors, and they have to be represented mentally somehow. Why doesn't it look like blue? Who cares? All that matters is that it has a distinct representation.
Also in the article, the "why do rotten eggs smell bad" example... Because sulfurous compounds are the result of the metabolic processes of various bacteria. Because those bacteria are present in rotting things, which can cause illness, we have evolved to find them repellent.
Why are my experiences different from others? Because that's just how biological organisms beyond a certain complexity work. No two are alike.
A similarly obvious explanation exists for every example in the article. I see no compelling case that experience cannot be described through biological processes or that consciousness didn't arise from complexity.
I'm not saying there aren't interesting mysteries where consciousness is concerned, just that this article seems to completely fail to explore them.
However we have a subjective experience of what it ‘feels like’ to see red. Why is that needed?
I think to conceive of a philosophical zombie, you have to say that consciousness is something uniquely special in that something possessing all its describing qualities is not it.
Not really, our sensors are extremely limited, if taste or smell are anything like vision we're almost sensorless. [0]
[0] https://eyelighting.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/quality-o...
> The problem is that there could conceivably be brains that perform all the same sensory and decision-making functions as ours but in which there is no conscious experience.
I think before this can be said to be a problem, it should be explained how such a brain (with human-like intelligence) can exist without mechanisms corresponding to the properties of consciousness.
But I would even argue that most living things above a certain neuron count are conscious. I think it's really flawed to assume that only we as humans have an awareness of self and are "conscious".
I don't see the distinction between my awareness of myself and my environment, and that of my dog for example. He is aware of himself, has ideas and acts on them, interacts with his world consciously. It's as if humans are grasping for some sort of uniqueness in nature. If you were a robot with sensors and cameras fed into a generally intelligent neural network. You wouldn't see a display of the data on a hud. You would be consciously immersed in the data. You would be the neural network. You would have an awareness of your environment, and you would be conscious of your existence in it.
I think consciousness is evolutionary. It allows living things to want to survive and preserve what they are. I think without consciousness a creature wouldn't have the strong drive for survival. In my opinion, it's what makes you long to continue your existence.
Why assume that they are conscious, over the simpler hypothesis (fewer assumptions) that they aren’t?
Create a turing machine out of marbles and levers, and it's suddenly "conscious" with the right configuration. You really believe that given enough space, a bunch of marbles running along tracks bouncing off levers can become aware that it is a giant marble machine?
The atoms in one pocket of the sun's chaotic fusion reaction might randomly and momentarily behave like an intelligent quantum computer - does that mean the sun is momentarily conscious from time to time?
Growing up, my vocabulary advanced waaay faster than my experience. I learned what the word "nostalgia" was well before I first felt nostalgic. In fact, I remember feeling it a few times about summers with friends that had moved before connecting the feeling with the word. It was a slap on forehead moment. I concluded that nostalgia was an inbuilt "thing", everyone else probably experienced it in the same way. It's easy for me to consider nostalgia as just an inbuilt reaction to a certain kind of signal. (Something periodic that makes you feel good, then it stops. Recalling the period creates a bittersweet feeling).
The space between consciousness and inanimate intuitively feels to me like a gradient. Various levels of brain damage might yield someone unresponsive to speech but responsive to pain. Then there are people who feel no pain, but otherwise are completely normal.
Therefore, I'd put on the lower end of the consciousness scale "reacting to changes" the more changes something reacts to, and the more varied their reactions, the more conscious it is. We're talking things between the sun and single celled organisms. Single cells don't seem to do much rumination, but they get hungry.
Advanced consciousness seems to require heritable lessons and skills. A feral human that somehow survived alone on an island from birth wouldn't be conscious like the rest of us are, but I bet it would still feel nostalgia if its favorite berry went extinct.
I'm comfortable ascribing feelings to things with full knowledge they aren't feeling it like we are. I bet red giant stars feel fat and old.
This is just defamiliarization. It's an excessively common belief that a computer with the right inputs, outputs, and software could realize that it is itself a computer program. The same software on a marble machine would be a lot harder to hook up to useful sensors, and would be too large to be at all practical, but it's the same thing.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strange_loop [2]https://philosophyandpsychology.wordpress.com/2008/01/24/the...
The thing would have to have correlates of consciousness; mechanisms which perform the properties which constitute conscious thought. I see no reason why such a mechanism could not be created by such general machinery as a marble run, albeit a very large one. The sun however is a chaotic ball of plasma, so I can't see how it could play home to an arbitrary complex mechanism.
See panpsychism and integrated information theory.
When you write a program to determine a pseudo-random number, I doubt there's any person that would seriously indulge the possibility that in that moment some entity puffs into existence, imagines itself picking a number, and then puffs back out of existence. But if this is true it makes any path towards artificial consciousness require some rather extensive handwaving and speculation that is not logically justifiable based on what we currently know.
edit: see my other comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20518623
Where is the rational thought behind this consciousness discussion? If all of you "critical thinkers" are really responding with "You just don't want to accept that consciousness can't be explained with science" then I have lost my last remaining bit of hope in humanity's intelligence.
Of course, in future we might understand things like consciousness and qualia, and it's likely that people who do it will be scientists. It won't be "science" though as we understand it today, it will necessarily have to be something bigger. Let's call it "science+".
And, of course, just because science can't explain consciousness doesn't mean that religion can. It can certainly claim to be able to do it, but will be as convincing as the religion is at explaining everything else.
If it cannot be so defined, then it cannot be explained within an empirical framework, or "science" if you insist, by definition. Empiricism requires objective measurement. The kind of consciousness people are talking about, the experience of being, cannot be objectively measured because it is a purely subjective concept.
If you want to talk purely about ideas that exist within an empirical framework, then you're talking about things like minds and brains, complexity of interactions, etc. All objectively measurable and perfectly scientific things.
But that isn't what people are talking about, because it isn't interesting. Because when you get right down to it what people really want to know is how badly we're allowed to treat things. If it isn't "conscious", then we need not concern ourselves over its apparent suffering need we?
I do think that "consciousness likely can't be explained by science" if you take science to mean the scientific method and models produced by it, and not just "rational thought" which I would argue is not the same thing.
Science at its core is a series of predictive models and they don't tell you how things "are" (whatever that means), but rather how things behave within some error bound. On the one hand I can see how it's dangerous to cast any sort of criticism in scientific results and theorems especially when they've been well established, but that doesn't mean they are "facts" or universal, only that they've withstood repeated criticism quite well.
The problem that this article is talking about is that you can't observe experience (consciousness) like you can observe "physical" phenomena, so you can't use the same sort of tools like you would use for conducting other sorts of science.
You obviously approach any intelligent discussion in consciousness with rational thought, and the people you can take seriously in this field do just that.
If you're interested in reading more about this I can point you to resources, which should probably start with Chalmer's "Hard problem of consciousness".
(You should have realized that HN has been infiltrated a long time ago)
Not precisely consciousness, but scientifically way better, than this BS article and many comments supporting it, because it is:
- measurable
- gives verifiable predictions, that actually hold true
- actually has some relation to real world which is also a multiplayer game of sorts
- shows you can reproduce the phenomenon in other forms (classical state enumerating programs, neural nets)
I too am disappointed in the low comment quality here
Geez, one spelling mistake ruined your day? I hope the rest of your week treats you better.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God_of_the_gaps
I think people delude themselves that science, at least as currently practised, is always objective.
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