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

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

#161

Post by gooserock » Mon, Sep 19, 2016, 2:06 AM UTC

kazinator wrote: post #158

If consciousness is just matter, why isn't yours accessible to me. There is something deeper at play. I have a hypothesis that a consciousness is a function of a universe. Each universe has just one consciousness. Another person's consciousness is inaccessible because it's in a different universe. Only the matter part of that is projected in your universe, not the actual identity. Without a hypothesis like this, we a…

> If consciousness is just matter, why isn't yours accessible to me.

Because my matter and your matter aren't in close enough physical proximity or the appropriate configuration to have any communication with one another. Same way that you and I both live in houses, but my front door doesn't open into your living room.

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

#162

Post by gooserock » Mon, Sep 19, 2016, 2:09 AM UTC

empath75 wrote: post #34

kanzure wrote: post #3

> Those who make the Very Large Mistake (of thinking they know enough about the nature of the physical to know that consciousness can’t be physical) tend to split into two groups. Members of the first group remain unshaken in their belief that consciousness exists, and conclude that there must be some sort of nonphysical stuff: They tend to become “dualists.” Members of the second group, passionately committed to the…

Saying that conciousness isn't real because it's an emergent phenomenon of non-conscious processes is like saying that turbulence isn't real, because it's an emergent property of non-fluid particles. I mean sure, at the level of atoms, it's just particles interacting locally, but that doesn't mean that at certain scales, turbulence isn't a better way of looking at their group behavior.

It's not that consciousness "isn't real" in the sense that flying unicorns aren't real - it's that "consciousness" is just a word that humans made to describe a phenomenon, just like "turbulence."

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

#163

Post by _1tem » Mon, Sep 19, 2016, 2:10 AM UTC

eli_gottlieb wrote: post #157

_1tem wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Our brains are information-theoretically and complexity-theoretically entirely reasonable. I know this has been the traditional view of most information theorists. But many philosophers (and a few computer scientists) challenge that view. See Fodor's frame problem[1]. The basic idea is this: yes, our brains are complexity-theoretically reasonable after the problem is defined given a set of inputs, outputs, and prob…

Everything in the brain is natively probabilistic. Representations which have low to zero mutual information with the current sensory input are simply not computed-with. You could say that almost all representations will have nonzero mutual information with almost all real-world sensory input, but the sensory input is precision-weighted, so it will take both a sufficiently high degree of mutual information and suffic…

> Representations which have low to zero mutual information with the current sensory input are simply not computed-with.

Who decides that a particular representation in the brain has zero mutual information with current sensory input? This requires a comparison of some sort (i.e. computation).

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

#164

Post by gooserock » Mon, Sep 19, 2016, 2:11 AM UTC

Perhaps I'm just not smart enough to understand what the hell this article is driving at. But I'm pretty confident in my personal understanding of "consciousness": it's a word that we use to describe our "experiencing" of the physical world, which is an emergent property of our incredibly complex neurological infrastructure.

Is this article agreeing with me, or disagreeing with me? I can't honestly tell.

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

#165

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Sep 19, 2016, 2:11 AM UTC

whybroke wrote: post #115

robotresearcher wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see a major problem with the difference between your own and other consciousness. Let's say you are American, and had never travelled abroad. You've only heard tales of France and Japan from others. Do you suspect that other countries have a fundamentally different nature to your own? >So you have the question of why I can only directly perceive that emergent property in exactly one brain and not others You a…

Consider the story from your own personal point of view not as an observer. I put you in a duplication chamber. In front of you is a card with the letter "A" In a neighboring identical empty chamber is card with a "B" on it. You close your eyes and I pull a big steam-punk lever and an exact copy of you is made in chamber B When you open your eyes, what letter do you see and why?

[deleted]

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

#166

Post by gooserock » Mon, Sep 19, 2016, 2:15 AM UTC

kazinator wrote: post #159

carapace wrote: post #88

This is terrible. Is is even an argument? I was reading "Hard problem of consciousness" Wikipedia article this morning: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness I'm not sure this adds anything to that. The author seems to want to say that consciousness is primary and that the physical universe, matter, is consciousness somehow, so poof no more mystery. But this doesn't touch the "hard problem" so w…

The main problem with the article is that it doesn't acknowledge that matter is a mystery and we don't know what matter is . So, reducing consciousness to matter doesn't eliminate the mystery.

But why are we talking about this in terms of "mysteries"? We'll always be able to reduce things down to a level where we don't know how it works. Right now, sure, we don't know what makes matter matterial, but for the purposes of the consciousness conversation, is that relevant? Just because we don't understand why electrons are electrons, does that prevent us from understanding how electricity works? "Consciousness" is an emergent property of our incredibly complex neurological infrastructure; just because we don't understand why the atomic components of that infrastructure doesn't mean that the emergent property has some "mysterious" aspect any more than anything else does.

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

#167

Post by armitron » Mon, Sep 19, 2016, 2:16 AM UTC

visarga wrote: post #81

mcguire wrote: post #75

" 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 c…

Even though solipsism is considered unfalsifiable, it can't explain why the world is so regular and yet complex, much more complex than human imagination. We can feel the limits of our imagination, but reality is much more complex. So there is the proof that there is an external world. It's not all in our imagination, because our imagination is less complex than the world we experience. If we said that our own imagin…

There is no proof of an external world, since nobody has ever experienced it. Everything you consider to be a part of that external world is mediated through your mind.

In short, you exist in virtual reality which is really manifested by your mental map which is layer upon layer of memories, personality traits, beliefs and thoughts.

That does not necessarily mean that "you" create _the_ world, only that your mind gives raise to the subjective reality you have access to, the only reality you have access to.

There may be an external, objective world out there, but we wouldn't be able to directly access it.

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

#168

Post by systoll » Mon, Sep 19, 2016, 2:19 AM UTC

roywiggins wrote: post #116

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.

Without 100% knowledge of all the physical causes, how could you ever rule out that the stuff you don't know about is caused physically? Proof that causality actually works (that physical effects are always caused by prior physical events) is not remotely on the horizon. If consciousness is something fundamentally nonphysical than causality is out the window, because my actions in the world are not actually caused by…

Even that doesn't work.

Epiphenomenalism is [roughly] a conception of the mind as a non-physical entity that 'creates' conciousness, but interacts with the physical world in a read-only manner.

100% knowledge of all physical causes does not rule it out, and it does not rule out 100% physical causality.

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

#169

Post by bbctol » Mon, Sep 19, 2016, 2:29 AM UTC

meric wrote: post #147

radarsat1 wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You have a body but you're not your body Not only that, but you're you because you're not someone else's body. That sounds tautological but I think it's important. I think a big part of what gives someone consciousness is identity, and what gives us identity, is the idea of us being an island isolotated within our body and therefore distinct from other conciousnesses. Which sounds pointless, but I think it's actual…

Perhaps consciousness is shared, only memory isn't, and the distinction is mere an illusion due to distinct memory. Perhaps that's how aiming to be "self-less" is a thing in Buddhism, Sufism, Zen, etc.

I'd say perception is more relevant to the experience of unique identity than memory; I only see out of my eyes, which makes me feel separate from those around me, even if we'd have lived through all the same experiences.

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

#170

Post by jwatte » Mon, Sep 19, 2016, 2:32 AM UTC

The article postulates that "everyones" definition of consciousness is "experience of any kind whatever." That's not my definition at all. My camera is not conscious because it experiences images. My speakers aren't conscious because they experience the sound vibration they emit. Consciousness may be an important part in us humans interpreting our experiences in some context, but it is totally different from those experiences. I can be conscious for a while in a sensory deprivation tank!

Separately, saying we "know nothing" about physics, just because we have to experience physics through our senses, is somewhere between disingenuous and false. We know how to predict the behaviour of physical systems very well. We know much less about how to predict conscious systems. So, if by "knowledge" you mean "ability to predict outcomes, possibly as result of stimuli," we know physics much more than consciousness. Or, perhaps, we know simpler physical systems, but but the complex systems that give rise to consciousness -- again, we know more about physics than consciousness, but not enough physics to explain consciousness as a physical system.

Finally, arguing that the mind is just its physical/chemical make up requires a lot more proof than we currently have. That argument reduces to "there is no free will." It may be true, but we don't know enough of quantum processes in the brains function to say that for sure. We certainly can't simulate or predict a couscous human brain yet.