The idea that everything is conscious is gaining academic credibility (2018) • Hacker News Board

Re: The idea that everything is conscious is gaining academic credibility (2018)

#21

Post by fruity123 » Wed, Apr 21, 2021, 1:11 AM UTC

colanderman wrote: post #14

I don't think there's any need to invoke as "magical" an idea as consciousness being a "fundamental property of matter" to reach the conclusion that many more things than we think are conscious. A 10,000 ft view of the human brain includes: memory, emotional state, sensory input, ability to monitor and control internal processes including memory and emotion, motor control, and a logical system to tie these together a…

I find the most difficult question of consciousness is why am I inside my brain and not someone else’s.

Out of the billions of people somehow I control only my brain.

Re: The idea that everything is conscious is gaining academic credibility (2018)

#22

Post by beaconstudios » Wed, Apr 21, 2021, 1:23 AM UTC

EMM_386 wrote: post #15

I personally believe in the theory of panpsychism but it raises so many crazy questions. What defines an object? If everything is just a sea of atoms where precisely is that boundary that says "this is a rock, and it as a whole is conscious". If I take a chip off that rock, do we now have two distinct conscious entities? If I cold weld two huge pieces of steel together so they fuse at an atomic level, did I just turn…

you might be interested in emergentism and constructivism as I believe they provide useful concrete answers to your questions. Panpsychism falls into the slippery question of defining what "consciousness" is; emergentism provides the frameworks of cybernetics and systems theory to approach many philosophical issues, and can be applied in a panpsychism-ish way by using the concept of self-organisation and adaptation to the environment as the scale for "consciousness".

constructivism says that our experience of reality is based in our perceptions and our labels for things are just useful mental models. An object is defined by how we use it - a chair is a thing you sit on, for example. The ship of theseus is whatever theseus uses to travel the river regardless of the planks it is made of.

I've not yet run into any internal contradictions in this worldview, which is the stick by which I measure sensemaking model efficacy.

Re: The idea that everything is conscious is gaining academic credibility (2018)

#23

Post by xyzzy21 » Wed, Apr 21, 2021, 1:40 AM UTC

tayo42 wrote: post #17

Is there a good place on the internet to read and discuss philosophical stuff like consciousness? Also, I'd take any book suggestions, I just finished consciousness explained and currently reading on consciousness. It's hard to find good books

We do NOT understand our own consciousness so it's idiotic to project what we don't even understand to inanimate objects.

This is superstition and anti-rationality. The right answer can always be "we don't know" but this is deciding "nope, we can just make shit up because it feels good!"

Basically taking civilization backwards by hundreds if not thousands of years!

Re: The idea that everything is conscious is gaining academic credibility (2018)

#24

Post by xyzzy21 » Wed, Apr 21, 2021, 1:42 AM UTC

nick_kline wrote: post #12

Avshalom wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://outline.com/8z79aN though the article isn't really anything more than a description of panpsychism, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panpsychism#Arguments_in_favor... and the Arguments Against section below that are basically a better version of the article

So consciousness is some kind of messy combination of matter, responding to inputs, to connections between particles. This feels wholly inadequate. My human consciousness is reduced when I get shot in the head but the particles are still there, so think about when my brain deteriorates, when I die. If you put my matter into a container all that matter is still there but I'm no longer able to have human consciousness…

Basically it's physics without any specific details or actionable predictions.

Re: The idea that everything is conscious is gaining academic credibility (2018)

#25

Post by zikzak » Wed, Apr 21, 2021, 1:42 AM UTC

colanderman wrote: post #14

I don't think there's any need to invoke as "magical" an idea as consciousness being a "fundamental property of matter" to reach the conclusion that many more things than we think are conscious. A 10,000 ft view of the human brain includes: memory, emotional state, sensory input, ability to monitor and control internal processes including memory and emotion, motor control, and a logical system to tie these together a…

People can't stand the idea that they are just part of a casual chain with no more free agency than a pebble buffeted by waves on a beach so they cling to the idea that they are special.

Re: The idea that everything is conscious is gaining academic credibility (2018)

#26

Post by epilys » Wed, Apr 21, 2021, 1:43 AM UTC

tayo42 wrote: post #17

Is there a good place on the internet to read and discuss philosophical stuff like consciousness? Also, I'd take any book suggestions, I just finished consciousness explained and currently reading on consciousness. It's hard to find good books

I'm reading the Bicameral Mind book by Jaynes and regardless of the "mind-body problem solution" it posits it has a good overview on the problem of consciousness at the beginning of the book

Re: The idea that everything is conscious is gaining academic credibility (2018)

#27

Post by BoiledCabbage » Wed, Apr 21, 2021, 1:58 AM UTC

thatguymike wrote: post #19

colanderman wrote: post #14

I don't think there's any need to invoke as "magical" an idea as consciousness being a "fundamental property of matter" to reach the conclusion that many more things than we think are conscious. A 10,000 ft view of the human brain includes: memory, emotional state, sensory input, ability to monitor and control internal processes including memory and emotion, motor control, and a logical system to tie these together a…

> What I don't understand is the need to invoke a je ne sais quoi -- a soul, quantum mechanics, whatever pseudo-matter the article is talking about -- to explain consciousness. Why should the above processes themselves not be sufficient to give rise to what we experience as consciousness, as an emergent phenomenon? Because consciousness, my experience of it at least, is a fundamentally different type of stuff to anyt…

> Because consciousness, my experience of it at least, is a fundamentally different type of stuff to anything that constitutes a brain.

Isn't a heart a fundamentally different type of stuff from the chemistry that comprises it?

What is actually so special about consciousness that it seems like it's different from any other emergent property?

Re: The idea that everything is conscious is gaining academic credibility (2018)

#28

Post by sadness3 » Wed, Apr 21, 2021, 1:59 AM UTC

m0llusk wrote: post #11

milesvp wrote: post #5

I think it’s important to think of consciousness as a spectrum. Having studied artificial life, the conclusion I came to is that something needs to be situated and have some degree of nervous system to be conscious. A rock is not concious, but a tree might be. A fly is less concious than a dog. A robot may be concious if it has enough sensors to react and significantly change it’s behavior due to processing (rather t…

Rock consciousness seems like a potentially interesting special case. If a rock perceives and reacts to its environment by being selected and crafted into a tool by a human might it then claim to be living in a hologram universe?

Silicon, for example.

Re: The idea that everything is conscious is gaining academic credibility (2018)

#29

Post by perl4ever » Wed, Apr 21, 2021, 2:32 AM UTC

EMM_386 wrote: post #15

I personally believe in the theory of panpsychism but it raises so many crazy questions. What defines an object? If everything is just a sea of atoms where precisely is that boundary that says "this is a rock, and it as a whole is conscious". If I take a chip off that rock, do we now have two distinct conscious entities? If I cold weld two huge pieces of steel together so they fuse at an atomic level, did I just turn…

I don't think the question you are asking is specific to consciousness.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sorites_paradox

Re: The idea that everything is conscious is gaining academic credibility (2018)

#30

Post by perl4ever » Wed, Apr 21, 2021, 2:37 AM UTC

ojosilva wrote: post #20

nick_kline wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So consciousness is some kind of messy combination of matter, responding to inputs, to connections between particles. This feels wholly inadequate. My human consciousness is reduced when I get shot in the head but the particles are still there, so think about when my brain deteriorates, when I die. If you put my matter into a container all that matter is still there but I'm no longer able to have human consciousness…

It's not useless, it's a valid approach to study the subject. Consciousness here is downgraded to a very "simple form", to more fundamental components that all matter possess in a way or another. So it does not mean that a rock is sentient like your mind is. It's more like saying, ie, that quantum entanglement could be a component of consciousness. A rock could interact with quantum entanglement, therefore it would b…

You can compute things by moving rocks around and placing them just so. (or using an abacus, etc)

Therefore (if you accept that intelligence is computable) there could be an intelligent mind denoted by a sufficient number of rocks over a sufficient period of time, even if it took billions of years to have a thought.

Whether "naturally" placed or by some agent.

I think this is not original of me, but I forget the source.