The unending quest to explain consciousness • Hacker News Board

Re: The unending quest to explain consciousness

#161

Post by dwaltrip » Fri, Dec 06, 2019, 4:22 PM UTC

rebuilder wrote: post #157

mantap wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How could another human being be not-conscious while displaying all the signs of consciousness? Maybe I have a failure of imagination but if ask my mother "are you conscious?" and she says "yes" then that's pretty conclusive evidence to me. This is actually such a dumb thread I think I'm going to stop now.

I am not conscious. Prove me wrong.

If you are human, you are conscious. Consciousness is to humans in the same way breathing is to humans.

There are many other arguments that I'm sure you are aware of. If all of these aren't enough for you, well then, I would direct you towards exploring solipsism.

Re: The unending quest to explain consciousness

#162

Post by toasterlovin » Fri, Dec 06, 2019, 4:22 PM UTC

abnry wrote: post #158

toasterlovin wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A materialistic approach to explaining consciousness is necessary, since consciousness can be affected by physical changes to the brain, which implies that consciousness is fundamentally a physical process.

Obviously a materialistic approach is necessary, but to claim it _only_ requires a materialistic approach is different.

Is there any reason to think that a materialistic approach is somehow not also sufficient to explain consciousness?

Re: The unending quest to explain consciousness

#163

Post by abnry » Fri, Dec 06, 2019, 4:27 PM UTC

toasterlovin wrote: post #162

abnry wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Obviously a materialistic approach is necessary, but to claim it _only_ requires a materialistic approach is different.

Is there any reason to think that a materialistic approach is somehow not also sufficient to explain consciousness?

Let me turn that question on its head and ask you why should it be sufficient? Just because it interacts with matter doesn't mean we default to assuming a materialistic approach is sufficient.

I can't get bogged down with arguing why it seems obvious to me that it isn't sufficient. As I wrote earlier, it still boggles my mind that people think otherwise.

Re: The unending quest to explain consciousness

#164

Post by toasterlovin » Fri, Dec 06, 2019, 4:29 PM UTC

yohsii wrote: post #136

toasterlovin wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A materialistic approach to explaining consciousness is necessary, since consciousness can be affected by physical changes to the brain, which implies that consciousness is fundamentally a physical process.

fundamentally physical? consciousness is fundamental and eternal, no beginning no end. forms change and are not fundamental at all.

Aspects of consciousness can be affected by brain injuries. So, yes, fundamentally physical.

Re: The unending quest to explain consciousness

#165

Post by carapace » Fri, Dec 06, 2019, 4:30 PM UTC

cassianoleal wrote: post #4

carapace wrote: post #2

The locus of sensory perception is not in the brain, out-of-body experiences indicate that. Thoughts are a kind of stuff different from the stuff that bodies are made of. They kind of hover around your head, and with practice, you can learn to see the thoughts around the heads of other people. Emotion is again a third kind of stuff. Gurdjieff identified emotion with the "blood" of a kind of emotional "body" that was…

> you can learn to see the thoughts around the heads of other people How do you learn that? If I'm being honest this sounds a bit too far fetched even for someone like myself who's experienced a fair share of strange phenomena that don't fit in the usual narratives. The Wikipedia link you posted sounds a lot like Raja Yoga. Are they related in any way?

I learned how from a pamphlet I ordered out of the back of a comic book. I'm not kidding, this is true. (O_o) What a world!

There are techniques, but really the essences of it is that we're already doing it but culturally conditioned to pretend we're not. If you overcome the cultural conditioning (in whatever way) "presto" you can perceive thought-forms "of others" (in quotes because thoughts are not ours, they're independent(-ish).) Have you ever noticed how some homeless crazy people mutter stuff that seems like it was related to what you're thinking, like they can see your thoughts? Yeah, that's because they can, poor bastards.

FWIW, I consider thought-reading to be voyeuristic and an invasion of privacy, as well as useless. Not recommended. (Besides, everybody is just thinking about sex anyway (or videogames these days.))

- - - -

In re: Raja Yoga the goal is the same but the method of Self-Inquiry is superior.

Re: The unending quest to explain consciousness

#166

Post by ghjyui » Fri, Dec 06, 2019, 4:31 PM UTC

corporate_shi11 wrote: post #98

The closest we will ever come to describing consciousness is simply describing the correlates of consciousness. The "ultimate cause" of it will forever be a mystery, behind the veil. Consciousness appears to exist outside of the physical world, in that we can describe a physical process entirely without invoking consciousness. Because of this, consciousness is beyond the scientific method and our fundamental understa…

Calling it something that's beyond us is a lazy argument that merely hides unwillingness to put an effort to understand this.

Re: The unending quest to explain consciousness

#167

Post by hackinthebochs » Fri, Dec 06, 2019, 4:34 PM UTC

abnry wrote: post #163

toasterlovin wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there any reason to think that a materialistic approach is somehow not also sufficient to explain consciousness?

Let me turn that question on its head and ask you why should it be sufficient? Just because it interacts with matter doesn't mean we default to assuming a materialistic approach is sufficient. I can't get bogged down with arguing why it seems obvious to me that it isn't sufficient. As I wrote earlier, it still boggles my mind that people think otherwise.

> why should it be sufficient? Just because it interacts with matter...

Because causal closure is a feature of our physical theories that have immense explanatory and predictive power. This is good reason to think that anything that interacts with the physical is also physical or supervenes on the physical.

Re: The unending quest to explain consciousness

#168

Post by JamOnItMahn » Fri, Dec 06, 2019, 4:35 PM UTC

This is one of the many reasons why I love science fiction. Many of my favorite novels center around consciousness and the related technology to assist/enable/enhance it. Reading these in my younger years, many of these novels have shaped my life, especially my career.

I may be confusing my authors, but some of the more recent novels I've read (from about 10 years or so ago, it's been a while), I think from Alastair Reynolds, have a wide range of ideas. Some center around the same kind of thing that Elon Musk talks about with Neuralink. Others take a wildly different path... putting an extant brain in a box or cabinet on wheels.

On this topic I used to be a huge fan of the concept of uploading. But then I formed the opinion that, if all we're doing is copying state, then the new instance is not the old inshttp://www.rudyrucker.com/wares/tance. It's just another instance with its own state from that point forward. I think it's also a Reynolds book where a person creates a copy of their consciousness and puts it into a very physically small spacecraft in order to travel a maximum speed to a very distance place (I forget the intended task). But upon return the two instances and ended up becoming antagonists due to their different experiences in the meantime.

Likewise, I want to say it was a Rucker book, a person is copied, and the copy is not them, just a new instance.

That kind of soured me on uploading. However, at the same time, it seems to me that can be akin to giving birth to the next generation. A gift of sorts. Maybe we ourselves can not directly enjoy the benefits, but possibly we can gift that possibility to our descendants.

I am particularly fond of old cyberpunk takes on this topic. Gibson and his wild cyberspace characters... the Oracle and Papa Legba, the self-aware pimpmobile, and the end of the one book where entities jumped out of all the fax machines around the world... good times.

Also Asimov and his robot-focused series.

I digress

Re: The unending quest to explain consciousness

#169

Post by carapace » Fri, Dec 06, 2019, 4:35 PM UTC

adrianN wrote: post #6

carapace wrote: post #2

The locus of sensory perception is not in the brain, out-of-body experiences indicate that. Thoughts are a kind of stuff different from the stuff that bodies are made of. They kind of hover around your head, and with practice, you can learn to see the thoughts around the heads of other people. Emotion is again a third kind of stuff. Gurdjieff identified emotion with the "blood" of a kind of emotional "body" that was…

Out-of-body experiences have failed to provide the person experiencing them with information that they couldn't have obtained while being in their body. That indicates that they're not in fact extrasensory experiences, but something that happens inside the brain.

It really depends on who you ask. There are people who routinely leave their bodies and go about and "obtain information", as you put it. Heck, there were Learning Annex classes on it. YMMV.

Re: The unending quest to explain consciousness

#170

Post by toasterlovin » Fri, Dec 06, 2019, 4:35 PM UTC

abnry wrote: post #163

toasterlovin wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there any reason to think that a materialistic approach is somehow not also sufficient to explain consciousness?

Let me turn that question on its head and ask you why should it be sufficient? Just because it interacts with matter doesn't mean we default to assuming a materialistic approach is sufficient. I can't get bogged down with arguing why it seems obvious to me that it isn't sufficient. As I wrote earlier, it still boggles my mind that people think otherwise.

FWIW, I believe your stance is the one that requires justification. After all, you seem to be positing (although it’s hard to tell, since you’re not committing to anything specific) that the default assumption about a phenomena we observe which takes place in a universe which otherwise follows the laws of physics, is that the phenomena is somehow not explainable using the laws of physics.