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What’s so hard about understanding consciousness?

nautil.us

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Re: What’s so hard about understanding consciousness?

#51

Post by misja111 »

hibernator149 wrote: post #20

My pet theory is that people who think that consciousness is not a hard problem are P-Zombies that can't experience the problem. On a more serious note, as a materialist, I have a really hard time accepting that my self/experience can't be explained materialistically. It's like I have this nice theory of everything, but it fails when I try to apply it to myself. Reminds me of Gödel's incompleteness theorem.

Your comment reminds me of religious people, whose argument that God exists is similar: that you will realize that He exists as soon as you believe in Him. And that you can't possibly understand it otherwise.

Consciousness is a hard problem until you realize that most of it is an illusion. Which is the very reason that it is so hard to understand: there's nothing to understand, because it's not real.

Re: What’s so hard about understanding consciousness?

#52

Post by abernard1 »

krapp wrote: post #26
zubspace wrote: post #23

What I find fascinating about consciousness is that it seems to be bound to your location. But how and why? Why are you inside of your body and not in someone elses? The article poses this question, but leaves it unanswered. For me it begs the question: If conscousness is bound to a location, is it possible to transfer consciousness from one entity to another? Is there some kind of thing we did not yet detect? What h…

This is only fascinating if you refuse to accept a non-supernatural or non-metaphysical definition of consciousness. Otherwise, most of these questions become trivial when consciousness is considered as a physical, biological process bound to the brain. Why is consciousness bound to a person's location? Because their brain is bound inside their skull. Why are you inside your body and not someone else's? Because your…

> Otherwise, most of these questions become trivial when consciousness is considered as a physical, biological process bound to the brain.

If it were trivial, we'd be creating conscious entities via knowhow and will, not the old fashioned (fun) way.

We... need it be said... cannot. We can't even describe what consciousness is in a way it can be measured or analyzed. We can make things that do things, sure. We can even impart some of our own "consciousness" into these doer machines like robots. But we have no useful way of understanding the phenomena we feel and how that might differ from the robot, or a cat, or a bat, or whatever.

> Why is consciousness bound to a person's location? Because their brain is bound inside their skull.

We might as well ask: why is software in a robot the way it is? Because the software is on that CPU in that physical case over there. It's a non-answer and a diversion. Software can be transferred to other hardware, and there are many questions to be had whether software is consciousness, and also what the nature of that consciousness is given that there's clearly a layer of representation (1s and 0s) different than the material reality of the electrons pumping through silicon.

Re: What’s so hard about understanding consciousness?

#53

Post by Sosh101 »

willis936 wrote: post #30

If you really want the answer then you need to be prepared to face some tough truths. There is no magic. Consciousness is an illusion. It's an emergent behavior from an incredibly complex neural automata.

How can you have an illusion without an observer? An illusion is by definition a subjective experience - it doesn't explain the thing doing the experiencing at all. You say there is no magic, but your explanation might as well be "it's just magic".

Re: What’s so hard about understanding consciousness?

#54

Post by derbOac »

zozbot234 wrote: post #17
erokar wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If consciousness is not embodied that would imply metaphysics and body/mind dualism, e.i. something countrary what one might term the scientific world view.

The most common naïve view among scientists is in fact quite close to body/mind dualism, much as phrased by Descartes. People who have examined the problem in depth tend to go for some form of pan-protopsychism, where the substrate for subjective phenomenology has to somehow be a part of the physical universe (since it clearly enters into causal relations with the rest of it!) but can also be expected to be rather ph…

This is kind of where I'm at. To me clearly qualia are part of the physical world, but no amount of understanding of neurophysiology is going to account for their existence without positing "something else".

My best guess is qualia and consciousness are like an EM field, something that exists and has some relationship with known physical entities but is distinct at the same time. It may be amplified by, say, some computational structure, but exists independent of it.

At one time I had convinced myself that qualia were related to time, in the sense that it was the "substantive" manifestation of time as a dimension, but now I'm not sure what I was thinking.

I suspect in the end consciousness will end up in the domain of physics rather than neurobiology and psychology alone.

Re: What’s so hard about understanding consciousness?

#55

Post by zozbot234 »

abernard1 wrote: post #39
hibernator149 wrote: post #20

My pet theory is that people who think that consciousness is not a hard problem are P-Zombies that can't experience the problem. On a more serious note, as a materialist, I have a really hard time accepting that my self/experience can't be explained materialistically. It's like I have this nice theory of everything, but it fails when I try to apply it to myself. Reminds me of Gödel's incompleteness theorem.

> I have a really hard time accepting that my self/experience can't be explained materialistically. I can respect this, but I think you have much bigger problems than consciousness if you're a materialist. Current natural philosophy and physics is far from anything resembling a materialistic worldview. Where we are right now in both QM and GR can best be described as a highly precise description of what happens, but…

Entanglement is part of material reality - the "classical" world where there is no entanglement is a simplified approximation. The fact that it might feel less "material" to us is an irrelevant feature of improperly-applied intuition. It's no different than someting like e.g. the wave nature of light.

In fact, complex entangled states made of many interrelated "qubits" or degrees of freedom are one of the most promising candidates for the physical correlate of similarly-complex phenomenological experience. Complex-enough quantum computers might just feel stuff, as a matter of basic reality.

Re: What’s so hard about understanding consciousness?

#56

Post by hibernator149 »

abernard1 wrote: post #39
hibernator149 wrote: post #20

My pet theory is that people who think that consciousness is not a hard problem are P-Zombies that can't experience the problem. On a more serious note, as a materialist, I have a really hard time accepting that my self/experience can't be explained materialistically. It's like I have this nice theory of everything, but it fails when I try to apply it to myself. Reminds me of Gödel's incompleteness theorem.

> I have a really hard time accepting that my self/experience can't be explained materialistically. I can respect this, but I think you have much bigger problems than consciousness if you're a materialist. Current natural philosophy and physics is far from anything resembling a materialistic worldview. Where we are right now in both QM and GR can best be described as a highly precise description of what happens, but…

Yes, I agree with your points. Superdeterminism could be a way to salvage my worldview.

Even so, accepting non-determinism from QM does not cause me as much cognitive dissonance than the problem of conscioussness.

Re: What’s so hard about understanding consciousness?

#58

Post by abernard1 »

zozbot234 wrote: post #55
abernard1 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I have a really hard time accepting that my self/experience can't be explained materialistically. I can respect this, but I think you have much bigger problems than consciousness if you're a materialist. Current natural philosophy and physics is far from anything resembling a materialistic worldview. Where we are right now in both QM and GR can best be described as a highly precise description of what happens, but…

Entanglement is part of material reality - the "classical" world where there is no entanglement is a simplified approximation. The fact that it might feel less "material" to us is an irrelevant feature of improperly-applied intuition. It's no different than someting like e.g. the wave nature of light. In fact, complex entangled states made of many interrelated "qubits" or degrees of freedom are one of the most promis…

> Entanglement is part of material reality

Yes, but what is material reality?

The current understanding of entanglement in QM is indistinguishable from math. And then we need to ask: are the equations real? Seriously, are they? Or are they just an approximate description of something we don't understand that well?

Because if entanglement is part of material reality as defined by the good ol' gauge theorists and the equations, then we really do live in a math equation, and it's not clear how or why that math equation runs the way it does. Or what it runs on for that matter. Or if it exists at all and our senses are just hallucinating this. This is fundamentally different from the understanding of philosophical, physical materialism.

Re: What’s so hard about understanding consciousness?

#59

Post by misja111 »

Sosh101 wrote: post #53
willis936 wrote: post #30

If you really want the answer then you need to be prepared to face some tough truths. There is no magic. Consciousness is an illusion. It's an emergent behavior from an incredibly complex neural automata.

How can you have an illusion without an observer? An illusion is by definition a subjective experience - it doesn't explain the thing doing the experiencing at all. You say there is no magic, but your explanation might as well be "it's just magic".

An illusion is a belief or perception which does not match reality. A belief is something that is stored in memory. So there is nothing to 'observe' about an illusion; an illusion is an error in either memory or perception of the observer himself.

Re: What’s so hard about understanding consciousness?

#60

Post by misja111 »

spupe wrote: post #46
willis936 wrote: post #30

If you really want the answer then you need to be prepared to face some tough truths. There is no magic. Consciousness is an illusion. It's an emergent behavior from an incredibly complex neural automata.

Consciousness is not an illusion, it is a real phenomenon that is experienced daily by almost every human. You might be referring to free will and its subjective experience, which is a different story.

It depends what you mean with 'real'. The experience or feeling of having consciousness is real, that's true. But the fact that humans experience consciousness doesn't make it a real physical phenomenon. Not so long ago most people believed that the Earth was flat because that's what they experienced when they looked around them. Many people believe in ghosts. Still this doesn't make them real.
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