Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Philosopher Philip Goff answers questions about panpsychism

scientificamerican.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 356 posts

Re: Philosopher Philip Goff answers questions about panpsychism

#111

Post by TuringTest »

hosh wrote: post #60
ajuc wrote: post #9

Mu. The definition provided ("consciousness is experience") explains nothing, you cannot experimentally decide if atoms experience anything, the fact that they do or don't doesn't change any prediction for how they behave over time. It's meaningless, like wondering if magic exists but is actively hiding from us. Paranoia is that way. > Despite great progress in our scientific understanding of the brain, we still don’…

Consciousness may be that thing that shows the limits of scientific experimentation.

Just like religious experience, then. Or any other metaphysical property, for that matter.

Re: Philosopher Philip Goff answers questions about panpsychism

#112

Post by jrsdav »

xamuel wrote: post #29

This is the exact wrong direction we should take if we want to have any hope of understanding consciousness. Rather than pass a bong around and declare the whole universe is conscious, we should question the consciousness even of entities whose consciousness we currently take for granted. We should ask: is it really true that all humans are conscious[1], or is there something specific that triggers consciousness? For…

I think it's more about the approach taken for researching the hard problem of consciousness (what you basically pointed out; what explains the phenomenon of subjective experience for conscious entities?).

Most researchers are doing exactly what you said, looking at it from the angle of "what arrangement of matter" gives rise to consciousness?. This model follows our intuitions and should definitely be explored; I don't think anyone is arguing the contrary.

But there are others, like the cognitive psychologist Donald D. Hoffman, who are doing research from the complete opposite side of this problem: what if consciousness is a fundamental property of the universe? He explains this far better than I can (pre-caffeinated) in his book The Case Against Reality[1], which I'd recommend you read if you're interested in this topic (he's also done quite a few interviews which can be found on youtube et al[2]).

Perhaps similar to you, I (a materialist) used to have what I can only call a "gut reaction" to this idea - panpsychism just seemed like "new age bullshit" that was impossibly wrong. But I'm becoming more open, and honestly the science being done is really fascinating[3].

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Case-Against-Reality-Evolution-Truth/... [2] https://youtu.be/4HFFr0-ybg0 [3] http://cogsci.uci.edu/~ddhoff/Chapter17Hoffman.pdf

Re: Philosopher Philip Goff answers questions about panpsychism

#113

Post by adwn »

kypro wrote: post #84

Am I the only one who thinks the consciousness question is really quite easy to understand and answer? The illusion of consciousness is obviously beneficial. For example, I could tell a computer, through the use of sensors, to report that it's in pain when it's hit. But you wouldn't take it seriously, or care for its suffering, because it hasn't also declared that it is under the illusion that its suffering has a kin…

You seem to be misunderstanding the question of consciousness. It's not about how you observe others to appear conscious, but about how you yourself observe your own consciousness.

> It's a lie our brain tells us [...]

Who is "us"? Or, to be more precise, if your brain tells you that you're experiencing pain, than what is "you", and what is "experiencing"? That's the question of consciousness.

This is not something we know how to observe and judge in others, you can only observe it in yourself (and draw conclusions about other people by analogy, i.e., due to similarity between our physical brain structures). For example, is the following Python script

    print("I am conscious.")
any more conscious than this one?

    print("I am not conscious.")
You'll probably say that they're both not conscious, although there is no hard evidence either way. And that's because we don't know how to reliably observe consciousness.

Re: Philosopher Philip Goff answers questions about panpsychism

#114

Post by Gatsky »

kypro wrote: post #84

Am I the only one who thinks the consciousness question is really quite easy to understand and answer? The illusion of consciousness is obviously beneficial. For example, I could tell a computer, through the use of sensors, to report that it's in pain when it's hit. But you wouldn't take it seriously, or care for its suffering, because it hasn't also declared that it is under the illusion that its suffering has a kin…

Well I think the tricky thing about consciousness is that it can’t be an illusion. There is no doubt that you and I have the subjective experience of consciousness. Whether it is an illusion or not doesn’t really matter, you are just making a judgement about the legitimacy of the process which leads to consciousness.

I think what you are getting at is the zombie concept. This is where we construct a being which has sensory inputs and actions, and behaves like a human, but isn’t actually conscious. Distinguishing zombies from real consciousness is supposed to highlight the difficulty in detecting or measuring consciousness. But, by definition the zombie doesn’t have any subjective experience. As soon as you introduce that, you are really saying the zombie is conscious.

As for using consciousness to decide if suffering has moral significance, well yeah that is an interesting idea. One concern is that if we can’t understand or detect consciousness, then we may create conscious artificial life which experiences unimaginable suffering, without even realising it. I don’t think we can say that the experiences of an AI will always lack moral significance.

Re: Philosopher Philip Goff answers questions about panpsychism

#115

Post by fjfaase »

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #89
Stierlitz wrote: post #75

> Does Consciousness Pervade the Universe? NO! > Where does consciousness come from? Emergent properties of a functional brain.

How functional must a brain be? We know that we can remove at least half of a human brain and still have a somewhat functional person. Where is the line drawn?

There are several conditions where a brain loses consciousness, the most common is sleeping. Joscha Bach has some interesting thoughts on what is needed to be conscious. Stanislas Dehaene and Thomas Metzinger have done interesting scientific research with respect to the brain and (various states of) consciousness.

Re: Philosopher Philip Goff answers questions about panpsychism

#116

Post by dbqpdb »

adwn wrote: post #90
dilap wrote: post #27

An interesting thought experiment is to imagine an incredibly-detailed computer simulation of a brain, down to the level of individual cells and neurotransmitters. (While this is beyond our current capabilities, it is in principle possible.) Hook the brain up to some decent IO devices, and you’d have an extremely human-like “AI”. (I’m glossing over some tricky details like, do you start with a fetus/baby brain and le…

To build on your thought experiment: > So the question is, this simulated brain, which is behaving very similarly indeed to a biological brain: does it have consciousness? Does it feel? If you answer "yes" to this question, what happens if you split the computations of that simulated brain over a million people equipped with pen and paper? Where is its consciousness happening now? I have yet to hear a satisfying answ…

If you haven't already, I highly suggest you read Permutation City by Greg Egan, these kinds of questions are explored in great depth.

Re: Philosopher Philip Goff answers questions about panpsychism

#117

Post by mannykannot »

adwn wrote: post #90
dilap wrote: post #27

An interesting thought experiment is to imagine an incredibly-detailed computer simulation of a brain, down to the level of individual cells and neurotransmitters. (While this is beyond our current capabilities, it is in principle possible.) Hook the brain up to some decent IO devices, and you’d have an extremely human-like “AI”. (I’m glossing over some tricky details like, do you start with a fetus/baby brain and le…

To build on your thought experiment: > So the question is, this simulated brain, which is behaving very similarly indeed to a biological brain: does it have consciousness? Does it feel? If you answer "yes" to this question, what happens if you split the computations of that simulated brain over a million people equipped with pen and paper? Where is its consciousness happening now? I have yet to hear a satisfying answ…

Ah, Searle's Chinese Room, for which the widely accepted response is the system reply: the system as a whole, and not one element of it, is conscious.

Consider performing the algorithm of Alpha Go Zero through a million people equipped with pen and paper. One can hardly argue against this being possible in principle, but what is playing the game?

This is not proof that AGI will automatically be conscious, or even just that some sort of conscious machine intelligence is possible, it is merely intended to suggest that Searle's line of argument does not show its impossibility.

Re: Philosopher Philip Goff answers questions about panpsychism

#118

Post by mapcars »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #105
kypro wrote: post #84

Am I the only one who thinks the consciousness question is really quite easy to understand and answer? The illusion of consciousness is obviously beneficial. For example, I could tell a computer, through the use of sensors, to report that it's in pain when it's hit. But you wouldn't take it seriously, or care for its suffering, because it hasn't also declared that it is under the illusion that its suffering has a kin…

Sorry, but this barely scratches the surface. The key problem of consciousness is not what we have an experience of (eg. "you're a real thing that thinks and feels"). It's the fact that it is possible to have any experience at all. Yes, it seems quite likely that a great deal of what we are conscious of is an "illusion" created in our brains, albeit some rather handy illusions. But that doesn't get even one step clos…

>core philosophical problem of how we (or anything else) is able to experience anything at all

By `how` you mean the mechanics of it or something else?

Re: Philosopher Philip Goff answers questions about panpsychism

#119

Post by [deleted] »

kypro wrote: post #84

Am I the only one who thinks the consciousness question is really quite easy to understand and answer? The illusion of consciousness is obviously beneficial. For example, I could tell a computer, through the use of sensors, to report that it's in pain when it's hit. But you wouldn't take it seriously, or care for its suffering, because it hasn't also declared that it is under the illusion that its suffering has a kin…

[deleted]

Re: Philosopher Philip Goff answers questions about panpsychism

#120

Post by arnoooooo »

empath75 wrote: post #7
arnoooooo wrote: post #4

I think non-duality / advaita makes much more sense than panpsychism, as it requires less assumptions while remaining compatible with our experience. Panpsychism seems like a bandaid to solve the hard problem of consciousness, which non-duality does not suffer from.

> Panpsychism seems like a bandaid to solve the hard problem of consciousness It doesn't even do that, it just pushes it down the stack. If I ask, why is the sky blue, I don't want to hear "Because it's made of blue stuff." Not only is it wrong, it doesn't have any explanatory power at all. Ultimately if you want to understand why something has a certain property, you want to know how it arises from the emergent beha…

agreed.
Post reply on HN