Is Consciousness Everywhere? • Hacker News Board

Re: Is Consciousness Everywhere?

#111

Post by visarga » Thu, Mar 18, 2021, 7:51 PM UTC

dr_dshiv wrote: post #56

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…

> perhaps a certain soulful software needs to interact with material phenomena in order to create feeling

In other words embodyment is a necessity for consciousness. The ability to explore, interact, make experiments, test theories, they all depend on having an able body to move around and a rich environment to explore. A body also brings necessities - the agent needs to work to keep itself alive, and has goals, positive and negative rewards. These are ingredients without which there would be no point for consciousness to exist.

Re: Is Consciousness Everywhere?

#112

Post by ryandvm » Thu, Mar 18, 2021, 7:52 PM UTC

frongpik wrote: post #81

This sounds like the bottom up approach, i.e. that "consciousness" is more like a medium that's everywhere, even an atom has a bit of this consciousness, and when such small bits assemble together, a bigger consciousness emerges. In this approach, I'm tempted to equate consciousness with the electromagnetic field - it's this field that allows us to experience the world. However human mind is something entirely differ…

I find the "individual atoms are conscious" to be kind of dopey, but I do like the idea that consciousness is a sort of gradient.

I would describe consciousness as the ability for an information processing system to model the world around it, and importantly, said information processing system's place in it.

As I sit here, my model of the world around me is humming along nicely. I believe I am quite conscious. My dog is sitting here beside me (awake) seems to be experiencing consciousness. My other sleeping dog is not conscious - perhaps it is dreaming, but that's not really modelling the world around it. And as we move down the scale, I become less and less convinced that various creatures are conscious. Birds? Sure. Fish? Maybe. Ants? Hmm. Bacteria? No.

At the lowest level, creatures that simply respond to stimuli are not conscious. But there's a lot of wiggle room between a bacterium and me. Right before I wake up in the morning, my model isn't really working. I would say at that point I'm not conscious. But within a few seconds, the model is running and I understand my place in it. That isn't an on/off situation. It's a gradient that I quickly pass through; becoming ever more conscious along the way.

And every night (or if I get a deteriorating neuronal disease and my neurons start to die off), the whole thing plays in reverse. My consciousness dwindles down to nothingness.

Re: Is Consciousness Everywhere?

#113

Post by hntrader » Thu, Mar 18, 2021, 7:53 PM UTC

kkoncevicius wrote: post #59

jstanley wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

There's no paradox here. When a lottery is drawn, someone has to win it and be left with the question "what are the odds?". Well, the odds that there will be a lottery winner in a position to ask that question is 1.

Re: Is Consciousness Everywhere?

#114

Post by xVedun » Thu, Mar 18, 2021, 7:53 PM UTC

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…

I would be curious to see how the author would respond to this fairly detailed criticism of his book: [1] One excerpt from this amazon review goes "If you are impressed by statistics, blips on fMRI screens, taking correlations as proof of causality and meta-analysis as equal to replication, then you might like this book. If you are interested in what wild speculations parapsychologists are coming up with these days, then this is the book for you. If you are looking for evidence that psi is explained by quantum physics, you'll be disappointed."

[1] https://www.amazon.com/review/R2VIDRICPX3ROL/ref=cm_cr_srp_d...

Re: Is Consciousness Everywhere?

#115

Post by hilbert42 » Thu, Mar 18, 2021, 7:53 PM UTC

Whether one shares Christof Koch's views on consciousness, panpsychism and or agrees or disagrees with the other postulates he makes in this essay - and there's a great deal to argue about - one would have to conclude that this is a remarkable piece of writing.

Koch not only writes from a position of possessing great knowledge of the subject but also he does so in a most coherent and lucid manner. Moreovr, he simultaneously conveying his own convictions with ease, eloquence and finesse.

Koch's analysis is certainly the most comprehensive of any short analysis of this subject material I've read, it was also the most understandable and enjoyable.

Re: Is Consciousness Everywhere?

#116

Post by morpheos137 » Thu, Mar 18, 2021, 7:53 PM UTC

nynx wrote: post #103

morpheos137 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am a non-materialist and I think consciousness is not a thing. So there's that position too. What do humans, mammals and earthworms have in common that AI or robots do not (as yet?) I would not say it is consciousness (because my position is there is really no such thing) but rather they have in common the fact that they are alive and subject to the Darwinian replication program and guided by common mental processe…

How does believing that all things are information differ from believing all things are matter? Those sound just like two sides of the same coin to me.

Materialists see information as deriving (resulting) from a spatial - temporal - state distribution of matter or energy. Informational people see information as giving rise (causing) to matter and energy. I subscribe to the Mathematical Universe Hypothesis more or less and am sympathetic to Cyclic Conformal Cosmology. Thus cause and effect are reversed.

Re: Is Consciousness Everywhere?

#117

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Mar 18, 2021, 7:54 PM UTC

[deleted]

Re: Is Consciousness Everywhere?

#118

Post by mehphp » Thu, Mar 18, 2021, 7:54 PM UTC

tomComb wrote: post #87

retrac wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have always had the rather unsettling feeling that my internal monologue is a post-hoc justification or rationalization for what my subconscious just caused me to do, and was not the cause.

Unfortunately I think there is a degree of consensus that that is how it works, and this is used as evidence for the lack of free will.

I'm not sure how free will would work, even in theory. If the universe is completely deterministic then of course there isn't freedom of will in that. If it is random, then that still wouldn't be freedom because it would still be out of our control.

I can't think of a way that it could work without invoking the metaphysical.

Re: Is Consciousness Everywhere?

#119

Post by visarga » Thu, Mar 18, 2021, 7:55 PM UTC

dr_dshiv wrote: post #50

We all start as single cells. When does the consciousness fairy come and turn the global workspace on? When neurons fire? Because no emergent property seems powerful enough to produce feeling — and because both sheep and snails seem to have different levels of feeling—i subscribe to the panpsychic view. For now.

What is feeling? It's an expectation of reward following some action and situation you are faced with. Feeling is dependent on the content, the "game" the agent is playing. It represents a way to evaluate good and bad actions in order to maximise reward. Thus, even though feeling is generated in the brain, it is not about neurons firing. Having a life, something to win or to lose will automatically be the source of feeling, the brain itself is just a component.

Re: Is Consciousness Everywhere?

#120

Post by tayo42 » Thu, Mar 18, 2021, 7:55 PM UTC

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…

> 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,

I'm skeptical of this claim in general, there's a lot of research that either isn't reliable, biased or gets twisted to support a claim. Then this i think becomes pop science, low quality sounds realistic to me kind of things. When you have to emphasize "based on science" my bs sensor goes off.

Idk if anyone else feels that way, I feel like have to approach a lot claims skeptically in fields I don't know enough about.