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Consciousness Goes Deeper Than We Think

blogs.scientificamerican.com

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Re: Consciousness Goes Deeper Than We Think

#81

Post by visarga »

bladecatcher wrote: post #70
visarga wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being unable to agree on a definition for consciousness is a huge problem. I think this happens because consciousness is being studied at a too abstract (high) level. Instead, we should switch to the low level dual of this problem - game theory and reinforcement learning. Fortunately, at this level definitions are exact and concrete - agent, environment, goal, actions, values. At this level we can understand and simu…

>> Instead, we should switch to the low level dual of this problem - game theory and reinforcement learning This sounds a bit naive.

Well, defining the "hard problem" hasn't gotten us any closer to understanding consciousness in the last 22 years. The hard problem just moves consciousness problem into an unfruitful direction. It's time for more practical approaches.

Re: Consciousness Goes Deeper Than We Think

#82

Post by bladecatcher »

visarga wrote: post #81
bladecatcher wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> Instead, we should switch to the low level dual of this problem - game theory and reinforcement learning This sounds a bit naive.

Well, defining the "hard problem" hasn't gotten us any closer to understanding consciousness in the last 22 years. The hard problem just moves consciousness problem into an unfruitful direction. It's time for more practical approaches.

Not sure where your 22 years estimate comes from. I think man has been trying to understand it for much longer maybe thousands of years ? - and has found answers through techniques that are outside of the mind - such as meditation.

Re: Consciousness Goes Deeper Than We Think

#83

Post by westmeal »

thevardanian wrote: post #27
erikpukinskis wrote: post #18

My best at guess is that the universe itself is conscious, and we'll eventually let go of the idea of individual consciousnesses. An ant hive sees a larger field more clearly than I do, maybe at a slower refresh rate but not by much. Are individual ants conscious? Somewhat. Are we conscious when we're receiving reality through memes beyond our comprehension? Somewhat. Are our rods and cones conscious? Our brain stem?…

No. the universe isn't conscious. The universe is matter. Consciousness is a part of the universe. Therefore consciousness is simply material. Nothing more, nothing less. It's just that our egos are too big to accept that we are nothing more than dirt.

While I agree with your statement it's hard to actually prove.

Re: Consciousness Goes Deeper Than We Think

#84

Post by mannykannot »

visarga wrote: post #71
mannykannot wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If there's anything it is like to be a worm, THAT'S the hard problem. I am not convinced - I suspect that there isn't anything to the experience of being like a worm; that the very question presupposes self-awareness of some sort. I suspect the hard problem of consciousness might lie in the self-referentiality of self-aware consciousness (though alternatively or in addition, it might be on account of its workings b…

> I suspect that there isn't anything to the experience of being like a worm Even a worm has goals to attain - food and reproduction. In order to attain those goals, it needs to have perceptions and to rank those by the estimated return value. That is what it's like to be a worm.

Talking about a worm as if it had goals is a teleological analogy that makes discussing its behavior easier, but I think it is a mistake to take this usage literally. If you do, you must also conclude that a thermostat has a goal, and therefore (by your argument) that there is a something that is what it is like to be a thermostat. I can only see this line of argument as a distraction that will only confuse any attempt to understand consciousness.

The rest of this discussion is hard to follow because it has apparently been edited, but you can't draw a line between applying your argument to animate things, but not inanimate ones, simply by choosing one word over another.

Re: Consciousness Goes Deeper Than We Think

#85

Post by IshKebab »

sorokod wrote: post #49
erikpukinskis wrote: post #18

My best at guess is that the universe itself is conscious, and we'll eventually let go of the idea of individual consciousnesses. An ant hive sees a larger field more clearly than I do, maybe at a slower refresh rate but not by much. Are individual ants conscious? Somewhat. Are we conscious when we're receiving reality through memes beyond our comprehension? Somewhat. Are our rods and cones conscious? Our brain stem?…

Perhaps individual ants are conscious to a degree. This kind of non binary contiousnes was explored in "I am a strange loop"

Consciousness is clearly a spectrum. Ask anyone who has ever got really drunk, or even woken up slowly.

Trying to ask 'when does a baby become conscious' is like trying to say 'when does a baby become tall'.

I still think consciousness is a real thing, and we definitely don't know what causes it, and maybe it is possible to find out. But I think the answer (if there is one) will come from AI - definitely not philosophers and probably not biologists.

Re: Consciousness Goes Deeper Than We Think

#86

Post by dEnigma »

visarga wrote: post #57
sriku wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If there's anything it is like to be a worm, THAT'S the hard problem. I don't believe we can get to the root of this "hard problem" by first trying to agree on a definition of the word before we can say anything about it. We will also need to admit the possibility that the question "are we conscious?" may be as vacuous at the end as "is Pluto a planet?".

Being unable to agree on a definition for consciousness is a huge problem. I think this happens because consciousness is being studied at a too abstract (high) level. Instead, we should switch to the low level dual of this problem - game theory and reinforcement learning. Fortunately, at this level definitions are exact and concrete - agent, environment, goal, actions, values. At this level we can understand and simu…

How does a bacterium have clear goals? What about one that has a generic defect and doesn't "try" to reproduce? Is it conscious? Is it part of a game? Is the stone that gets dissolved by lichen part of a game?

Re: Consciousness Goes Deeper Than We Think

#87

Post by jurasource »

breckinloggins wrote: post #5

This equivocation between consciousness and meta-consciousness is so widespread that a plethora of books, which are seemingly dedicated to the project of "explaining consciousness", instead spend their entire contents explaining some hypothesis involving meta-consciousness and then proceed to declare victory without ever touching consciousness itself. Jaynes' "The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bica…

I found this series on the New York Review of Books website gives an understandable, and readable history of the main threads of discussion on this, http://www.nybooks.com/topics/on-consciousness/

Re: Consciousness Goes Deeper Than We Think

#88

Post by stepik777 »

xelxebar wrote: post #15

This article, like most discussions on "consciousness" I encounter reads like little more than word games to me. We could similarly write articles about all the qualities and properties of phlogiston, and we'd have learned just as much. What thing are we actually trying to explain here? What is the extensive meaning of the word "consciousness"? How can I emperically determine if some object/animal/thing possesses con…

> How can I emperically determine if some object/animal/thing possesses consciousness?

There is currently no way. We don't even know if all humans possess it and what animals do. Maybe people who deny its existence just don't have it.

> How is "consciousness" not just a modern word for "soul", minus the afterlife stuff?

It's not modern vs old, it is more scientific vs religious.

I agree that most articles about consciousness feel like word games though.

Re: Consciousness Goes Deeper Than We Think

#89

Post by rullelito »

creo wrote: post #73

Lets challenge this. What if baby can be born alive without having consciousness? It's not impossible since we can't detect consciousness. Maybe it occurs in some babies born with brain development problems, maybe not. Besides title says "Consciousness Goes Deeper Than We Think". Sounds clicky-baity and it assumes that reader is dumb.

There's nothing saying a fully functional human must have consciousness. It could just be that some people are machines acting on biologically coded rules, and that they don't have an inner experience of their self.

Re: Consciousness Goes Deeper Than We Think

#90

Post by mannykannot »

xelxebar wrote: post #15

This article, like most discussions on "consciousness" I encounter reads like little more than word games to me. We could similarly write articles about all the qualities and properties of phlogiston, and we'd have learned just as much. What thing are we actually trying to explain here? What is the extensive meaning of the word "consciousness"? How can I emperically determine if some object/animal/thing possesses con…

Calling 'consciousness' 'soul without an afterlife' is just as much a word game as any other - which is to say that if it is offered as the starting point of a discussion, it is not simply a word game, but if it is declared to be the answer, then it is.

I don't think the circularity is there, because while there do not seem to be other animals today with the same sort of consciousness as humans, we can reasonably assume that some of our now-extinct ancestors had various levels of consciousness, whatever it is.

We are indeed groping around here like 18th-century scientists trying to make sense of heat. I don't think that makes it pointless, but we should be suspicious of the claims of either physicalists or dualists who think that they have proven the other side is wrong (though my instincts are with the physicalists.)

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