Consciousness and its Place in Nature (2002) • Hacker News Board

Re: Consciousness and its Place in Nature (2002)

#21

Post by bobbington » Sat, Jun 24, 2017, 5:41 AM UTC

joe_the_user wrote: post #19

themgt wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Always hilarious to me how many educated humans will actually go argue that they are p-zombies rather than face the paradoxes of consciousness. I guess all I'll say is, physics seems capable of explaining the evolution of our universe and e.g. the emergent complex phenomena of solar systems and planets and such. Physics and the other hard sciences do not seem to lend a lot of clarity as to how a self-organizing piece…

You're mobilizing a different argument here - since we can't construct it, there must be some transcendent property. I can't see how that evokes any of the paradoxes of consciousness. I mean, 200 years ago, humans didn't have a plausible idea how the sun work, should they have assumed God was behind it? Edit: and humans certainly broadly have a decent idea of the physics and chemistry that gave rise to life even if t…

The sun is a physical body, so a physical explanation makes sense. The problem is, our subjective experience isn't actually physical. It has no mass, no shape, no size. It may correspond to movements in the brain, but the experience itself is not material. For all we know we could be in the matrix, and our subjective experpence could be just as real. In fact Elon musk thinks it's a very high probability that we are in the matrix. Since our experience of the world is not material it doesn't seem to follow that there must be a material explanation for it.

Re: Consciousness and its Place in Nature (2002)

#22

Post by ableton » Sat, Jun 24, 2017, 5:50 AM UTC

joe_the_user wrote: post #19

themgt wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Always hilarious to me how many educated humans will actually go argue that they are p-zombies rather than face the paradoxes of consciousness. I guess all I'll say is, physics seems capable of explaining the evolution of our universe and e.g. the emergent complex phenomena of solar systems and planets and such. Physics and the other hard sciences do not seem to lend a lot of clarity as to how a self-organizing piece…

You're mobilizing a different argument here - since we can't construct it, there must be some transcendent property. I can't see how that evokes any of the paradoxes of consciousness. I mean, 200 years ago, humans didn't have a plausible idea how the sun work, should they have assumed God was behind it? Edit: and humans certainly broadly have a decent idea of the physics and chemistry that gave rise to life even if t…

The sun is a physical body, so a physical explanation makes sense. The problem is, our subjective experience isn't actually physical so the same logic doesn't apply. Our subjective experience has no mass, no shape, no size, and can't be measured. It may correspond to movements in the brain, but the experience itself is not material. For all we know we could be in the matrix, and our subjective experpence could be just as real. In fact Elon musk thinks it's a very high probability that we are in the matrix. Since our experience of the world is not material it doesn't seem to follow that there must be a material explanation for it.

Re: Consciousness and its Place in Nature (2002)

#23

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Jun 24, 2017, 6:02 AM UTC

Puts wrote: post #20

themgt wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Always hilarious to me how many educated humans will actually go argue that they are p-zombies rather than face the paradoxes of consciousness. I guess all I'll say is, physics seems capable of explaining the evolution of our universe and e.g. the emergent complex phenomena of solar systems and planets and such. Physics and the other hard sciences do not seem to lend a lot of clarity as to how a self-organizing piece…

The why I think is quite clear from an evolutionary standpoint. Whithout self consciousness all our actions would only be triggered by surrounding events, hungry - eat, tired - sleep and so on. But with the ability to reason about our self we can for example find and cure diseases long before we feel any pain which is an evolutionary benefit.

[deleted]

Re: Consciousness and its Place in Nature (2002)

#24

Post by sjeohp » Sat, Jun 24, 2017, 6:04 AM UTC

Puts wrote: post #20

themgt wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Always hilarious to me how many educated humans will actually go argue that they are p-zombies rather than face the paradoxes of consciousness. I guess all I'll say is, physics seems capable of explaining the evolution of our universe and e.g. the emergent complex phenomena of solar systems and planets and such. Physics and the other hard sciences do not seem to lend a lot of clarity as to how a self-organizing piece…

The why I think is quite clear from an evolutionary standpoint. Whithout self consciousness all our actions would only be triggered by surrounding events, hungry - eat, tired - sleep and so on. But with the ability to reason about our self we can for example find and cure diseases long before we feel any pain which is an evolutionary benefit.

Is it so clear? For one thing consciousness is not necessarily synonymous with the ability to reason.

Observe your own consciousness; observe the generation of each individual thought and experience. Are you conscious of their origin or do they simply arise in a stream from the darkness of your subconscious?

If the later is true (IE if your subconscious is doing the real work), then is consciousness essential to reason or merely coincidental?

Re: Consciousness and its Place in Nature (2002)

#25

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Jun 24, 2017, 6:10 AM UTC

joe_the_user wrote: post #19

themgt wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Always hilarious to me how many educated humans will actually go argue that they are p-zombies rather than face the paradoxes of consciousness. I guess all I'll say is, physics seems capable of explaining the evolution of our universe and e.g. the emergent complex phenomena of solar systems and planets and such. Physics and the other hard sciences do not seem to lend a lot of clarity as to how a self-organizing piece…

You're mobilizing a different argument here - since we can't construct it, there must be some transcendent property. I can't see how that evokes any of the paradoxes of consciousness. I mean, 200 years ago, humans didn't have a plausible idea how the sun work, should they have assumed God was behind it? Edit: and humans certainly broadly have a decent idea of the physics and chemistry that gave rise to life even if t…

[deleted]

Re: Consciousness and its Place in Nature (2002)

#26

Post by antonvs » Sat, Jun 24, 2017, 6:16 AM UTC

joe_the_user wrote: post #8

"Conscious states include states of perceptual experience, bodily sensation, mental imagery, emotional experience, occurrent thought, and more. There is something it is like to see a vivid green, to feel a sharp pain, to visualize the Eiffel tower, to feel a deep regret, and to think that one is late. Each of these states has a phenomenal character, with phenomenal properties (or qualia) characterizing what it is lik…

> " Why do not these processes take place "in the dark," without any accompanying states of experience? This is the central mystery of consciousness."

> -- Because each information processing system only processes its own information? It only "sees" its input, not some other system's input.

That's not the issue. The issue is why experiences are associated with the processing of input. A computer program represents "green" as some combination of bits, but most people don't believe it has an experience of greenness beyond the mechanistic processing of some bit sequence through its predefined rules.

Even if our minds are "merely" a set of rules processing information, there's still an extra element we experience that we currently can't satisfactorily explain.

> A sophisticated information processing system could be expected to have observations on its internal processes too - just a server might have logs, processed logs and what-not.

Good example - do you believe that a computer program that produces and analyzes logs of its internal processes has a conscious experience, analogous to ours?

A process that analyzes logs is still a process like any other. There's nothing special about it that would lead us to believe that suddenly experience arises in that process, where it hasn't arisen in all the lower-level processes.

This is why one "solution" to the problem of consciousness is to claim that even e.g. thermostats have some degree of consciousness. By claiming all processes are conscious to some degree, you don't have to explain the leap to consciousness.

But if you don't accept that solution, then the information processing model only underscores the problem.

Re: Consciousness and its Place in Nature (2002)

#27

Post by antonvs » Sat, Jun 24, 2017, 6:19 AM UTC

Puts wrote: post #20

themgt wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Always hilarious to me how many educated humans will actually go argue that they are p-zombies rather than face the paradoxes of consciousness. I guess all I'll say is, physics seems capable of explaining the evolution of our universe and e.g. the emergent complex phenomena of solar systems and planets and such. Physics and the other hard sciences do not seem to lend a lot of clarity as to how a self-organizing piece…

The why I think is quite clear from an evolutionary standpoint. Whithout self consciousness all our actions would only be triggered by surrounding events, hungry - eat, tired - sleep and so on. But with the ability to reason about our self we can for example find and cure diseases long before we feel any pain which is an evolutionary benefit.

> But with the ability to reason about our self

The ability to reason about ourselves does not automatically imply consciousness. Programs can be written that reason about themselves, but we have very little reason to believe they are conscious.

Re: Consciousness and its Place in Nature (2002)

#28

Post by obastani » Sat, Jun 24, 2017, 6:26 AM UTC

joe_the_user wrote: post #8

"Conscious states include states of perceptual experience, bodily sensation, mental imagery, emotional experience, occurrent thought, and more. There is something it is like to see a vivid green, to feel a sharp pain, to visualize the Eiffel tower, to feel a deep regret, and to think that one is late. Each of these states has a phenomenal character, with phenomenal properties (or qualia) characterizing what it is lik…

I don't think your comments really answer the questions that are being asked. The question, as far as I understand it, is why humans can't operate exactly as they do now, but without the sensation of consciousness.

I don't think the question is "hard", I think it simply does not have a good solution. Science can explain how things work, but not why. One day, we may even be able to have an empirical theory of consciousness, e.g., how manipulating various parts of the brain affect how we are conscious, what physical structures are needed to generate consciousness (or at least, beings that act as if they are conscious), etc., but we can never explain why we are conscious, i.e., why we have experience.

Re: Consciousness and its Place in Nature (2002)

#29

Post by antonvs » Sat, Jun 24, 2017, 6:45 AM UTC

joe_the_user wrote: post #15

mcbits wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Subjective perception is "hard" because everything we know about physics works exactly the same without it, so at this point we have literally no idea where it fits. But this is kind of a predestined result because the way we approach most science is to filter out subjective phenomena as much as possible and examine only so-called objective phenomena.

"Subjective perception is "hard" because everything we know about physics works exactly the same without it, so at this point we have literally no idea where it fits." - Something defined as magically, unexplainably different indeed tautologically can't be explained by physics. - But internal representation of phenomena by the brains of humans certainly seems like it can be explained by biology, physics and general c…

> - But internal representation of phenomena by the brains of humans certainly seems like it can be explained by biology, physics and general common sense.

Yes, it can. Computer programs have internal representation of phenomena, and so do brains/minds. This doesn't address the problem of consciousness, though.

> That the brain produces internal processes when it receives external stimuli - how hard is that?

Again, no mystery there - we make machines that produce internal processes when they receive external stimuli, and we understand pretty well how they work.

But that's the problem, because that understanding doesn't imply anything that resembles consciousness, and no-one knows how to make that leap other than either claiming consciousness is just a property of all processes, or claiming that the problem doesn't exist.

What stops you from writing a conscious computer program?

Re: Consciousness and its Place in Nature (2002)

#30

Post by biofox » Sat, Jun 24, 2017, 7:08 AM UTC

themgt wrote: post #18

joe_the_user wrote: post #8

"Conscious states include states of perceptual experience, bodily sensation, mental imagery, emotional experience, occurrent thought, and more. There is something it is like to see a vivid green, to feel a sharp pain, to visualize the Eiffel tower, to feel a deep regret, and to think that one is late. Each of these states has a phenomenal character, with phenomenal properties (or qualia) characterizing what it is lik…

Always hilarious to me how many educated humans will actually go argue that they are p-zombies rather than face the paradoxes of consciousness. I guess all I'll say is, physics seems capable of explaining the evolution of our universe and e.g. the emergent complex phenomena of solar systems and planets and such. Physics and the other hard sciences do not seem to lend a lot of clarity as to how a self-organizing piece…

Maybe the fact that these opinions exist is evidence that p-zombies walk amongst us?