The unending quest to explain consciousness • Hacker News Board

Re: The unending quest to explain consciousness

#71

Post by mellosouls » Fri, Dec 06, 2019, 11:47 AM UTC

tim333 wrote: post #60

rebuilder wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I doubt it. We can't prove other humans are conscious, I don't see how AI will help clarify anything there.

I'm thinking along the lines of Feynman's "What I cannot create, I do not understand." If we can build machines with dreams, feelings and the like similar to human ones I imagine we'll have a better understanding of how the thing works. Bit like the difference between philosophers of old pondering how birds fly and how to define the word flying vs aircraft designers who build working aircraft and have degrees in aero…

Unfortunately I think this greatly underestimates the qualitative difference of the fundamental nature of the phenomenon of consciousness to anything we have modeled or built before.

Sure, we can and will build conscious machines (I believe), but we will do that modelling cognition - and yes, we will develop a better understanding of that.

But consciousness is very different and will come with the territory unbidden, and unexplained.

Re: The unending quest to explain consciousness

#72

Post by normalnorm » Fri, Dec 06, 2019, 11:48 AM UTC

hoseja wrote: post #68

normalnorm wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Consider all emergent phenomena that you know of. Let's say: stock market prices, ant hills, biological organisms, ecosystems, etc, etc. What all these have in common, is that they are too complex to explain in terms of individual interactions, but you can point at the individual interaction . We know that financial markets are made of transactions, of that biological organisms are made of molecular interactions, but…

Why can't they point to "interactions of neurons"?

You can point to a protein being expressed by DNA, and then understand how many protein molecules amount to cells, then tissues, then organs. There is a first principle guiding you all the way, even though the complexity is staggering.

There is no such first principle with interactions of neurons, in the sense that we know of no quality or property of a neuron that could amount to the phenomena "consciousness", in the same way that individual transactions amount to a stock market.

Without this first principle, it's just magical thinking disguised in scientific language.

Re: The unending quest to explain consciousness

#73

Post by ablation » Fri, Dec 06, 2019, 11:51 AM UTC

normalnorm wrote: post #61

bloak wrote: post #58

I expect people will give up eventually, just as they gave up trying to explain how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.

An important difference is that angles are imaginary entities, while I doubt people with give up on explaining the most direct thing they can experience, which is their own consciousness.

> angles are imaginary entities

Tell that to Pythagoras.

Re: The unending quest to explain consciousness

#74

Post by pygy_ » Fri, Dec 06, 2019, 11:51 AM UTC

roenxi wrote: post #55

pygy_ wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Emergentism doesn’t explain qualia. You won’t be able to explain the difference between green and magenta to a blind person.

From an emergentist perspective there is nothing to explain - qualia are an illusion created by having a certain level of complexity in the stimuli fed into a brain. Emergentism has a lot of easy outs once the initial assumption - that it is possible for the self to be an illusion of complexity - is made. If that is palatable then any niggle can be explained away as just part of the illusion. And that initial assumpt…

That sounds plausible. Another issue I have with emergentism and other functionalist theories is that they don’t seem to account for the persistence of identity across consciousness discontinuities. Your consciousness sometimes vanishes the re-emerges as yourself. Where (or when) is your mind during the leap? Does it perform discrete time travel?

Re: The unending quest to explain consciousness

#75

Post by paraschopra » Fri, Dec 06, 2019, 11:52 AM UTC

Something that blows my mind: we can use our understanding of physics and math to predict the trajectory of a rocket to the moon without actually going there..

But we can’t predict what new color we’d get by mixing two colors. We just have to mix them to find out.

Re: The unending quest to explain consciousness

#76

Post by normalnorm » Fri, Dec 06, 2019, 11:52 AM UTC

zadler wrote: post #65

normalnorm wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Consider all emergent phenomena that you know of. Let's say: stock market prices, ant hills, biological organisms, ecosystems, etc, etc. What all these have in common, is that they are too complex to explain in terms of individual interactions, but you can point at the individual interaction . We know that financial markets are made of transactions, of that biological organisms are made of molecular interactions, but…

Science does take place within consciousness, but also outside of it, since there are discreet conscious entities that can be studied.

There is only one conscious entity that you have direct experience of, which is yourself, and as far as you are concerned, all of science is contained within your conscious experience.

You (and also me) reason by analogy, and we assume consciousness in other beings, but we cannot directly observe it or measure it, in the sense that we can measure all the things on which we can do empirical investigations (e.g. an electrical field of a weight).

So maybe science takes place in multiple consciousnesses (this is what I believe, but I can't prove it), but I don't see how it could take place outside of consciousness.

Re: The unending quest to explain consciousness

#77

Post by harmoat » Fri, Dec 06, 2019, 11:53 AM UTC

thecupisblue wrote: post #22

adrianN wrote: post #5

The 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's circular logic with a dubious interpretation of quantum physics. The idea that consciousness could somehow be the cause of the collapse of the wave function is anthropocentrism and shows a poor understanding of what measurement is.

Re: The unending quest to explain consciousness

#78

Post by mellosouls » Fri, Dec 06, 2019, 11:55 AM UTC

My personal preference is for panexperientialism (essentially a bare bones panpsychism), with the idea that the phenomenon is somehow connected with change, and belongs to anything capable of change in some way and is probably a fundamental property of nature, as fundamental as space or time.

It's important to divorce consciousness from all ideas of "thought", "will" etc. to consider it's essence which is more connected with "awareness of being", though even that is too complex I think.

Obviously this is complete conjecture, but it has growing philosophical support - at least as an idea worth discussing - I think.

http://www.eoht.info/page/Panexperientialism

Re: The unending quest to explain consciousness

#79

Post by normalnorm » Fri, Dec 06, 2019, 11:56 AM UTC

ablation wrote: post #73

normalnorm wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An important difference is that angles are imaginary entities, while I doubt people with give up on explaining the most direct thing they can experience, which is their own consciousness.

> angles are imaginary entities Tell that to Pythagoras.

Hehe :)

Re: The unending quest to explain consciousness

#80

Post by OrderlyTiamat » Fri, Dec 06, 2019, 12:09 PM UTC

mantap wrote: post #41

rebuilder wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I doubt it. We can't prove other humans are conscious, I don't see how AI will help clarify anything there.

You could use an MRI machine to show that their brain activity is the same as yours, and if you know you are conscious then that should be evidence enough. Or you could just ask them.

An MRI scan, while incredible technology, is an indirect measure of an indirect measure of brain activity, has several seconds delay and a spatial resolution of a couple of millimeters. The "same" brain activity in two mri scans to me doesn't approach the kind of evidence I would be looking for here.