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

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

#31

Post by itisit »

zikzak wrote: post #25
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.

Can you blame them?

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

#32

Post by dumbfoundded »

zikzak wrote: post #25
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.

That's sort of the catch-22 of consciousness. Awareness without agency is pretty pointless.

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

#33

Post by colanderman »

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…

I guess the way I see it, given that we don't currently have a way to test for consciousness, inventing invisible "consciousness-stuff" is just a solution in search of a problem. We are supposing that it is necessary with no evidence.

> The analogy that occurs to me is that you're assembling a really complex jigsaw puzzle and expecting it to fly.

I would though. More precisely -- if I looked at a real airplane and modeled it with, say, balsa wood and a rubber-band propeller, even with no understanding of why airplanes fly, I would expect it to fly, and I think that would be reasonable. I don't think that I would think, because flight is so fundamentally different than what wood and rubber bands normally do, that a "real" airplane must be also composed of some invisible "flight-stuff" that I cannot harness for my model. Even if I say, neglected to angle the propeller blades or wings correctly, so it did not fly or even move on its first attempt, supposing a new branch of physics would not be my go-to explanation.

I do see your point though about consciousness being a qualia and philosophical zombies (thanks for introducing me to that term). It's supremely challenging to conceptualize who is the "me" who is experiencing consciousness.

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

#34

Post by colanderman »

dumbfoundded wrote: post #32
zikzak wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's sort of the catch-22 of consciousness. Awareness without agency is pretty pointless.

Nah, the fun is that you get to be aware of what your body will do before others experience it. Being conscious is like being your body's own Patreon supporter.

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

#35

Post by amanaplanacanal »

fruity123 wrote: post #21
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.

It’s a common experience of people who try meditation the first time to discover that they don’t control their brain at all.

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

#36

Post by jasfi »

I think that the quality of consciousness is a good fit for brains. If a plant has consciousness it doesn't mean that much because there isn't anything like the brain to experience things. Although I have read that they may have very basic sensing structures.

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

#37

Post by krageon »

BoiledCabbage wrote: post #27
thatguymike wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

> What is actually so special about consciousness

Nothing, but if there's one thing I've learned discussing this at length with philosophers and AI students it's that once you get down to it and all the argumentation is gone it will boil down to "I'm special because I want to be". In that sense, discussing these matters with most people is just not a productive use of your time. Unless perhaps you've never done it before and you want to find out what that's like :)

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

#38

Post by fighterpilot »

perl4ever wrote: post #30
ojosilva wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 sour…

This is a key question.

If we can replicate the information processing in 1 minute of brain activity by rearranging and moving rocks in a specific way over a 10 year period, would that arrangement of rocks have subject conscious states, or not?

If yes, it's a good argument in support of panpsychism, because those conscious states would seem to be substrate-independent. And if not, why does the brain have subjective states but these rocks do not? What makes our wetware particularly special?

There's clearly something profound going on here, even if it's currently beyond our ability to articulate properly within a scientific framework.

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

#39

Post by skhm »

fruity123 wrote: post #21
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.

I was ruminating on this on a long walk recently and it occurred to me that I'm probably not "only inside my brain", as you put it.

"You" aren't only inside your brain at all. Imagine that at every timestep, there's a single consciousness that experiences qualia all at once, across all matter - and the feeling of being "inside your brain" is just that the qualia happening there have a large number of causal relationships to your recent brain activity, your working memory, longer-term memories, inputs from your senses, etc - but at that same instant, "you" are also the person sitting across from you - there just isn't the same level of cross-chatter and so "you" can't experience both brains simultaneously.

Kind of like context switching in an OS or something. This would enable a panpsychic view where consciousness was field-like, taking on large values where matter is densely causally connected, such as in the brain, and low values where it isn't, such as in the empty space between two people.

Anyway, as Hicks said, "we are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively ... here's Tom with the weather."

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

#40

Post by skhm »

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

Permutation City by Greg Egan - it's fiction, but honestly it will do as good a job as any textbook on the subject to force you to really think about your beliefs about the nature of consciousness.
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