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Is Consciousness Everywhere?

thereader.mitpress.mit.edu

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Re: Is Consciousness Everywhere?

#51

Post by forgotmypw17 »

geophile wrote: post #12

I have been hearing about Koch, and Tononi, and panpsychism, and phi for years now, in these articles summarizing consciousness for laymen, (a group that includes me). And these very long articles bloviate but never go any further than giving a facile description of phi, claiming that this IIT "theory" is testable, and then not saying how it could be tested. The articles from five years ago and this one seem intercha…

A good place to start, if you are a firm skeptic and not willing to even attempt faith or your own empirical experiences, is a book called Entangled Minds. There is not a single claim made in this book which does not have a reference to a proper peer-reviewed paper attached to it, iirc several hundred papers in all. It firmly supports consciousness being in at minimum earthworms, and probably even ,,lower,, creatures.

Once you actually open your mind to this idea, you will begin to see it everywhere, and with practice be able to connect, communicate, and derive mutual benefit. It,s up to you to take the first step, though.

Of course, you can also choose to remain in the safe comfort of materialism. I know from experience that it can be a very lonely place. I wish you a happy journey, wherever it may lead.

Re: Is Consciousness Everywhere?

#52

Post by namero999 »

hntrader wrote: post #40
namero999 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But then the onus is on those who sense it to point out said bullshit.

Burden of proof generally isn't on the skeptic.

I think there is a difference between a proof and the refutation of an argument. I expect proofs from scientific theories, and if a theory of consciousness would posit itself as scientific, I would be in perfect agreement with you that proofs or testable predictions should be provided. But I think here we are well into philosophy grounds, where neither proofs nor predictions are required. If that is the case, a philosophical claim needs to be actively rejected. I will admit that I still have to make my mind whether IIT is purely philosophy, purely scientific, or neither. Currently I don't think it's a theory of consciousness, rather just a model to "quantify" consciousness, without explaining its origin.

Re: Is Consciousness Everywhere?

#53

Post by dr_dshiv »

My consciousness (I won't speak for yours) is integrated yet contains many parts. It is hierarchical — and I am aware that there is much that I am not aware of. For instance, with some effort I can notice that a white wall is made of millions of blinking colored neuropixels. But normally that is below my awareness. When I meditate, sometimes I can notice that I'm thinking verbal thoughts—suggesting that verbal thoughts transpire subconsciously, as well. When I engage with people, there is a sharing of consciousness—and though I'm not aware of all that the others are experiencing, I recognize that my own experience is just the tip of the iceberg of "experience."

Re: Is Consciousness Everywhere?

#54

Post by twobitshifter »

meepmorp wrote: post #26
cambalache wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are no missing anything. Reputations in academy are not only made by being correct and inventive. You can go pretty far if you know how to dress-up bullshit.

I completely agree, and would only point out that the ability to get far on properly calibrated bullshit is a well established phenomenon throughout human history.

See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grievance_studies_affair

Re: Is Consciousness Everywhere?

#55

Post by elektropionir »

geophile wrote: post #49
jbotz wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't "call bullshit" because you can't personally see how to falsify a theory by reading some popularized science articles. There are real papers with math behind these claims, and when you've read them and at least tried to understand the math, then you can call bullshit if you still think so.

I am not qualified to do so. The existence of "real papers with math behind thest claims" is sort of irrelevant. IIT is being proposed as a scientific theory, and the author of TFA claims that IIT is testable, but he has not said anything about actual testing. I cannot judge the math, and I doubt that I could judge a scientific paper describing a test. I'm simply asking: Is there any actualy testing, completed or in…

Here is a talk in which he mentions specific experiments:

https://youtu.be/LGd8p-GSLgY?t=3512

This is a fairly old talk and if you do a bit more digging I think he has other talks with more experiments.

Re: Is Consciousness Everywhere?

#56

Post by dr_dshiv »

The Pythagoreans believed that soul (greek: "psyche") was different from conscious sensation. Philolaus, for instance, wrote that the interaction of soul and body produced feeling. Soul referred to the immaterial nature of eternal reality — immaterial and eternal in the sense of mathematics. For instance, spheres and triangles are never perfectly instantiated in the material world, yet they are very real.

This I find fascinating — that perhaps a certain soulful software needs to interact with material phenomena in order to create feeling. I don't know that I believe it, but it is a sensible reason to believe that consciousness is not pervasive.

Re: Is Consciousness Everywhere?

#57

Post by geophile »

justinpombrio wrote: post #37
geophile wrote: post #12

I have been hearing about Koch, and Tononi, and panpsychism, and phi for years now, in these articles summarizing consciousness for laymen, (a group that includes me). And these very long articles bloviate but never go any further than giving a facile description of phi, claiming that this IIT "theory" is testable, and then not saying how it could be tested. The articles from five years ago and this one seem intercha…

I don't think you're missing anything. Tononi made a formula related to how complicated a system is, and claimed that its measures consciousness. And what are you supposed to say to that, when no one can agree on what the word "consciousness" means, but people are still so attached to the word? For Scott Aaronson's take on "Integrated Information Theory": https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=1799

Excellent reference. I see that Aaronson is pointing to articles more than ten years old, so the lack of progress goes on longer than the five years I mentioned.

Re: Is Consciousness Everywhere?

#58

Post by 613style »

tgv wrote: post #25

By what possible commonly agreed upon definition could consciousness be equal to experience? The only result of accepting that definition would be having to invent a new name for what I (and I believe many with me) call consciousness, as badly defined as it is. To put it in the words of Syndrome: if everything is conscious, nothing is.

> By what possible commonly agreed upon definition could consciousness be equal to experience?

I'll turn the question around: What aspect of your consciousness is not an experience? What aspect of your experience is not a part of consciousness?

Re: Is Consciousness Everywhere?

#59

Post by kkoncevicius »

jstanley wrote: post #41
kkoncevicius wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not quite - I find the hypothesis for "consciousness is everywhere" to be too hard to accept based on the observation that I ended up as human (assuming that humans are somehow "higher" than other being of course). Or stated a bit fancier - the p-value of the null "consciousness is everywhere" is astronomically small, given this observation of me ending up as a human.

But you can forget consciousness and ask the same question. The chances that the matter you're made of ended up making you is astronomically small compared to it just being random space dust or something. And yet it happened. I think it's just selection bias.

No no, I disagree, these are very different things.

The matter I am made of is nothing special - everything has same kind of matter so I am bound to have some of it. But the consciousness I have is very special - top shelf in all of biology.

Say bacteria are conscious. Here is how special this is: the number of bacteria on earth is estimated to be "five million trillion trillion". And there are ~7 billion humans. So the chance that I randomly end up as human, instead of bacteria is ~ 0.0000000000000000000001. And that is disregarding all other creatures.

Re: Is Consciousness Everywhere?

#60

Post by kharak »

forgotmypw17 wrote: post #51
geophile wrote: post #12

I have been hearing about Koch, and Tononi, and panpsychism, and phi for years now, in these articles summarizing consciousness for laymen, (a group that includes me). And these very long articles bloviate but never go any further than giving a facile description of phi, claiming that this IIT "theory" is testable, and then not saying how it could be tested. The articles from five years ago and this one seem intercha…

A good place to start, if you are a firm skeptic and not willing to even attempt faith or your own empirical experiences, is a book called Entangled Minds. There is not a single claim made in this book which does not have a reference to a proper peer-reviewed paper attached to it, iirc several hundred papers in all. It firmly supports consciousness being in at minimum earthworms, and probably even ,,lower,, creatures…

Is there a good podcast or Youtube video for starters? Highly sceptic of the idea and therefore intrigued.
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