"Unending" is right. We'll not solve this because the problem is beyond reason.
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The unending quest to explain consciousness
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Re: The unending quest to explain consciousness
#22The really hard problem of consciousness is giving a definition that allows me to tell whether a rock is more or less conscious than a person.
If it can influence how the wave collapses, it is conscious.
Re: The unending quest to explain consciousness
#23An interesting thing to me is the unending quest may somewhat end during our lifetimes through us being able to build conscious AI and see how it works.
Highly unlikely, as we are not nearer conscious machines now than we were 100 years ago. There is nothing about computers that make them more conscious than e.g. radiators.
Re: The unending quest to explain consciousness
#24The really hard problem of consciousness is giving a definition that allows me to tell whether a rock is more or less conscious than a person.
I think this is a good question. Though we have some tools. Did you ever faint? I did, definitely wasn’t conscious. Or whenever they dozed me under in thr hospital, not conscious. In parts of my sleep, I’m not conscious. I now know this because recently my tinnitus became worse and I now here it in my dreams, based on the sound and frequency, I can infer time because of it (my tinnitus, although annoying has a regula…
> There’s a similar process of losing some consciousness when I become too stoned
Hey could you please check https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypnagogia and tell me if this is this is similar to the too stoned/not sleeping state (except the paralysis, I assume you can move with enough willpower)? Did you ever take psychedelics? What's your meditation experience?
Re: The unending quest to explain consciousness
#25Manzotti’s account (as described in the article) ignores dreams, or the fact that directly zapping the brain elicits experience (e.g. magnetic stimulation of the visual cortex triggers colorful flashes known as phosphenes). Graziani’s approach is more interesting, as a theory of attention, but falls short on qualia, and focuses on peculiarities of the human brain, assuming that a cerebral cortex is necessary for gene…
> My pet theory
It may be similar to Russelian monism. A theory that I'm most aligned to. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/russellian-monism/
Re: The unending quest to explain consciousness
#26"Unending" is right. We'll not solve this because the problem is beyond reason.
The existence of the world, and of myself as a subjective being, are beyond reason. Understanding how either work provided they exist isn’t a priori unsolvable.
Re: The unending quest to explain consciousness
#27"It's very hard to change people's minds about something like consciousness, and I finally figured out the reason for that. The reason for that is that everybody's an expert on consciousness. (...) With regard to consciousness, people seem to think, each of us seems to think, "I am an expert. Simply by being conscious, I know all about this." And so, you tell them your theory and they say, "No, no, that's not the way consciousness is! No, you've got it all wrong." And they say this with an amazing confidence."
"A lot of people are just left completely dissatisfied and incredulous when I attempt to explain consciousness. So this is the problem. So I have to do a little bit of the sort of work that a lot of you won't like, for the same reason that you don't like to see a magic trick explained to you. How many of you here, if somebody -- some smart aleck -- starts telling you how a particular magic trick is done, you sort of want to block your ears and say, "No, no, I don't want to know! Don't take the thrill of it away. I'd rather be mystified. Don't tell me the answer." A lot of people feel that way about consciousness."
https://www.ted.com/talks/dan_dennett_the_illusion_of_consci...
"in fact, you're not the authority on your own consciousness that you think you are."
The paper: "Explaining the "magic" of consciousness", Daniel Dennett, 2003:
https://ase.tufts.edu/cogstud/dennett/papers/explainingmagic...
Re: The unending quest to explain consciousness
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
How do you know that the rock is not aware of stuff? if you say consciousness is just neurons firing in certain patterns you have also given an answer to the traditional "hard" problem of consciousness, with hundreds of pages of philosophical thought that refutes your answer.
If you're not a dualist, thoughts necessarily have to be accompanied by some change of state of the material substrate.
Don't underestimate the complexity of a rock's internal state. There is a unfathomable number of atoms in complex crystal lattices in there. Defects in that lattice alone can encode a ton of information. Then you have a bunch of quantum state for each elementary particle. All of that reacts to external stimuli like temperature, pressure, or the occasional cosmic ray.
Re: The unending quest to explain consciousness
#29The really hard problem of consciousness is giving a definition that allows me to tell whether a rock is more or less conscious than a person.
If it can influence how the wave collapses, it is conscious.
That is an interesting starting point.
How do you set the bounds of a conscious entity though? Does the concept make sense in QM?
How would it explain the persistance of identity across lapses of consciousness?
Re: The unending quest to explain consciousness
#30Manzotti’s account (as described in the article) ignores dreams, or the fact that directly zapping the brain elicits experience (e.g. magnetic stimulation of the visual cortex triggers colorful flashes known as phosphenes). Graziani’s approach is more interesting, as a theory of attention, but falls short on qualia, and focuses on peculiarities of the human brain, assuming that a cerebral cortex is necessary for gene…
What makes you believe that your conscious perceptions have any specific (let alone regularizeable) kind of relationship to reality at all? In all likelihood, conscious perceptions are guided entirely by evolution, emphasizing those aspects of reality needed to keep us alive and filtering out those we can safely ignore.
https://www.nature.com/articles/544296a?WT.mc_id=FBK_NA_1704...