Consciousness Isn’t a Mystery, It’s Matter • Hacker News Board

Re: Consciousness Isn’t a Mystery, It’s Matter

#71

Post by mcguire » Sun, Sep 18, 2016, 9:52 PM UTC

ArkyBeagle wrote: post #59

collyw wrote: post #11

"Human conscious experience is wholly a matter of physical goings-on in the body and in particular the brain." Is there any proof of this? The while article seems to hinge on this assumption and then go on from there. We can't see or measure consciousness (brain activity yes, consciousness no). We only experience it. The article makes far to many naive assumptions without any proof.

If you assert that consciousness has no physical cause, then that's all you can say about it. You're skyhooking. you can take the wrong turn Penrose took and posit that it's due to quantum effects, as a sort of middle ground. My way of looking at it is that we use "consciousness" as a default bucket for things we don't have instrumentation to measure, or otherwise have a functioning predictive model for.

I've always wondered if anyone has pointed out to Penrose that asserting all behavior is random is not better than the alternatives, philosophically speaking.

Re: Consciousness Isn’t a Mystery, It’s Matter

#72

Post by RileyKyeden » Sun, Sep 18, 2016, 9:52 PM UTC

paulsutter wrote: post #64

Consciousness is a suitcase word, which makes it challenging to debate. From [1]: "In The Emotion Machine, Marvin Minsky discusses suitcase words—words that contain a variety of meanings packed into them, such as conscience, emotions, consciousness, experience, thinking, morality, right, and wrong. "The word ‘consciousness’ is used to describe a wide range of activities, such as “how we reason and make decisions, how…

This sounds similar to thought-terminating cliche.

Re: Consciousness Isn’t a Mystery, It’s Matter

#73

Post by VLM » Sun, Sep 18, 2016, 9:54 PM UTC

If consciousness is just a complicated computation, which seems the simplest explanation, then it can be analogous to the attitude toward "old computer science beliefs". As a side issue, someday much like people make furniture using 300 year old technology there will be craftsman making programs using no algorithm discovered (learned? found? created?) post 1970.

Its a good thing we invented computers in recorded history and they're not prehistorical or delivered from space aliens, or we'd be having the same sophistry about philosophical discussions about computers as we do about consciousness. What, you claim a mere arrangement of impure silicon atoms implements the majesty and beauty of the lambda and the red black tree? When you think of binding a value to a variable, how do you propose to do that with mere atoms alone? So you think you can build a computer completely out of NOR gates, well, that's very nice but seeing as computers came from space aliens and no human has ever made a computer we'll wait on that theory until we see you run "hello world" on it. Surely an "intelligent designer" created computers and such complexity cannot operate via mere atoms, much like mere atoms arranged in peculiar shapes makes hard steel.

Something like this already almost exists between the EE/microcontroller type people vs the CS/algo people. Note my plethora of weasel words, something, almost, etc.

Aside from the philosophical analogies being entertaining by themselves, it would make interesting hard sci fi. Imagine a world where god is blamed for giving us clay tablets containing most of automata theory. Wouldn't that be an interesting sci fi setting?

Re: Consciousness Isn’t a Mystery, It’s Matter

#74

Post by stcredzero » Sun, Sep 18, 2016, 9:55 PM UTC

breuleux wrote: post #42

stcredzero wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are problems with our experience of experience. We think consciousness is continuous, but it can be clearly demonstrated that it's fragmentary. Daniel Dennett demonstrates this using alternating images in his TED talks. However, just because our experience of experience doesn't have 100% fidelity, it doesn't follow that our experience doesn't exist. That would be like saying our vision doesn't exist because it…

It means is that our experience isn't what we think it is, but if the discrepancy is large enough, that's more or less the same thing as saying it doesn't exist. Basically, if none of the aspects of consciousness that make it important or special in our eyes turn out to be true, I think that denying its existence is actually a less misleading way to correct the record than trying to completely change our intuitive un…

Our vision isn't what we think it is, with some quite large discrepancies, but it's still completely nuts to say it doesn't exist!

Re: Consciousness Isn’t a Mystery, It’s Matter

#75

Post by mcguire » Sun, Sep 18, 2016, 9:57 PM UTC

"I find this odd because we know exactly what consciousness is — where by “consciousness” I mean what most people mean in this debate: experience of any kind whatever. It’s the most familiar thing there is, whether it’s experience of emotion, pain, understanding what someone is saying, seeing, hearing, touching, tasting or feeling. It is in fact the only thing in the universe whose ultimate intrinsic nature we can claim to know. It is utterly unmysterious.

"The nature of physical stuff, by contrast, is deeply mysterious, and physics grows stranger by the hour."

The author seems to be traveling a road very close to solipsism.

If the only thing you can know is your own consciousness...

Re: Consciousness Isn’t a Mystery, It’s Matter

#76

Post by mcguire » Sun, Sep 18, 2016, 9:58 PM UTC

astazangasta wrote: post #69

paulsutter wrote: post #64

Consciousness is a suitcase word, which makes it challenging to debate. From [1]: "In The Emotion Machine, Marvin Minsky discusses suitcase words—words that contain a variety of meanings packed into them, such as conscience, emotions, consciousness, experience, thinking, morality, right, and wrong. "The word ‘consciousness’ is used to describe a wide range of activities, such as “how we reason and make decisions, how…

Every word is a suitcase word.

My words mean exactly what I wish them to mean.

Re: Consciousness Isn’t a Mystery, It’s Matter

#77

Post by 7373737373 » Sun, Sep 18, 2016, 10:02 PM UTC

davmre wrote: post #65

7373737373 wrote: post #57

Integrated Information Theory[0][1] is the first approach to solving these problems that make sense for me. It takes an axiomatic approach and provides a computable method to associate both a level of consciousness and the content of the experience to an arbitrary causal system. Unlike all these unscientific philosophical considerations it can actually be used to create testable hypotheses. [0] http://integratedinfor…

Have you read Scott Aaronson's "Why I Am Not An Integrated Information Theorist" ( http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=1799 )? He commends IIT for making falsifiable predictions, but argues that some of those predictions are, in fact, false.

Yes. In the follow-up linked above he also describes the authors' responses to this. The predictions are not de facto false. He argues that they are intuitively false, which is a matter of personal belief but not empirical research. The same goes for some counterarguments.

Re: Consciousness Isn’t a Mystery, It’s Matter

#78

Post by _1tem » Sun, Sep 18, 2016, 10:02 PM UTC

breuleux wrote: post #55

RivieraKid wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the experience of color or taste is triggered when information is fed to the brain through specific pathways The question is why the experience is triggered. Why does moving atoms at specific positions trigger the perception of color or pain? Current physics doesn't have an answer for that, even in theory, assuming we can see exactly what happens in the brain.

The thing is, though, that even if "physics" did have an answer to this, it's not a given that we would understand it. Our incapability to wrap our head around reductionist explanations of qualia does not entail that they are inaccurate, only that they fail to satisfy us. I mean, let me put it this way: what do you expect from an answer? For example, in order to understand why atoms moving in certain ways produce a t…

What I expect from an answer to the hard problem of consciousness is a basic high level explanation for how the moving of atoms in certain ways can actually give rise to qualia. You seem to be starting with the presumption that it does. But I'm not convinced that the moving of atoms alone can possibly give rise to qualia, because our knowledge so far about how atoms move seems completely different from our experience of qualia.

On the other hand, I don't understand all the details of what goes into a Macbook Pro, from network protocols to graphics rendering, but I have a basic high level understanding of how the things it does are possible, and it doesn't take a Library of Congress to explain that. My high level knowledge of how atoms move provide sufficient assurance and understanding of how a Macbook Pro experience is created. That is simply not true for qualia.

Re: Consciousness Isn’t a Mystery, It’s Matter

#79

Post by paolomaffei » Sun, Sep 18, 2016, 10:03 PM UTC

Scientific rationalism at its worst: trying to apply logic for something that is beyond logic, and all the way not realizing the basic mistake of thinking that everything in experience can be expressed or understood with logic, thought and scientific experiments.

The writer (and a very large part of society) is so oblivious to the unconscious dogma "Everything can be explained in a consistent scientific system" that he doesn't even see it he's holding it - precisely like a Christian will tell you "Look stuff is like this, it says so in the bible".

All this mental masturbation about trying to locate consciousness in the brain/body is utterly ridicoulous. Why do you think you haven't found it yet? Hello?

But according to scientific rationalism everything that exist is matter (for only matter can be PROVED to exist with a scientific experiment...), so consciousness must be there too right? Just like a man who's lost his keys outside, but the street is very dark and cold, so he decided to search for them in his house, which has lights to see better and is much more comfortable.

Re: Consciousness Isn’t a Mystery, It’s Matter

#80

Post by narag » Sun, Sep 18, 2016, 10:05 PM UTC

collyw wrote: post #50

goatlover wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The evidence is that consciousness is tied to the physical somehow (via brains at least). What this means, we haven't been able to figure out. Or at least, there is no consensus.

I am not denying it is tied to the physical, that seems fairly obvious, but it doesn't mean that it is a only physical phenomenon. A radio is not the same as the channel that it is playing and one is tied to the other.

Maybe you would sound more clear if you explained what else, different from "physical" there is that conciousness, or anything else for that matter, could be attributed to.