Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

What’s so hard about understanding consciousness?

nautil.us

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 393 posts

Re: What’s so hard about understanding consciousness?

#71

Post by qwerty456127 »

misja111 wrote: post #47
qwerty456127 wrote: post #8

> One point on which you both clearly agree is that consciousness is an embodied phenomenon, It probably is but I wouldn't be so sure it is. I have neither a feeling nor a rationally logical proof of this idea. It's just an intuitive guess. > we have the ineffable experience of being alive in this world The experience of being, and the experience of attributes like "alive" and in "somewhere in particular" are separat…

> I have neither a feeling nor a rationally logical proof of this idea. It's just an intuitive guess. This intuition, that there is something special and unique about what 'we' are, is baked into our brains by many thousands of years of evolution, and this makes it so extremely difficult for us to believe that there's nothing more to us then a bunch of molecules. This is why people have invented theories about souls,…

It's difficult to believe we are nothing more to us then a bunch of molecules because I still am me if I loose an arm, a memory or any given part of my brain. One can gradually replace every tiny part of his body with prosthetics and the point at which he will stop being them and become an imitation both exists and does not. What's the difference between me and a perfect imitation? I believe I am going to remain where I was if someone just makes an atom-perfect copy of mine and puts it near so the copy will probably have exactly the same memories I have and believe it is me but will not be me actually.

Re: What’s so hard about understanding consciousness?

#72

Post by abernard1 »

krapp wrote: post #69
abernard1 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 eve…

>If it were trivial, we'd be creating conscious entities via knowhow and will, not the old fashioned (fun) way. I wasn't claiming the problem of consciousness as a whole was trivial, rather the specific questions being asked in the above comment become trivial when a biological origin of consciousness is assumed. > But we have no useful way of understanding the phenomena we feel and how that might differ from the rob…

> the specific questions being asked in the above comment become trivial when a biological origin of consciousness is assumed.

But unless there are complementary answers, they're trivial in the "useless" sense. They (1) don't provide any explanatory power, and (2) may very well be wrong--because as we've established--we have no clue.

It's of the same argumentative caliber as the anthropic principle: "Well, we're here because that's just the way we do things here in UniverseCorp."

I too could assume that consciousness is due to a particularly fascinating arrangement of angels dancing on physical atomic pins. I could say that every person is localized to a certain angel, or maybe a soul, and vociferously call it trivial because if you assume this thing then it naturally follows. But I don't want to assume that thing because that thing is totally useless at describing anything. Which is still where we are with consciousness, and the history of science is filled with whiplash and disappointment at finding older more primitive beliefs were more "true."

> There are no 1s and 0s separate from the material reality of electrons and silicon, that's an entirely human abstraction that doesn't exist in the hardware

There are 1s and 0s that are going across the world right now from you to me, and they're being transferred into electrons and photons and who knows what else afterwards. They may be emergent phenomena, but they exist, just like molecules exist as combinations of atoms: they have rules, those rules are exact and can be understood. Those rules are also not materially real, and yet they can be made immanent. We as tiny humans have built a real system where we have separated representation from reality, and we have not yet determined whether The Universe (TM) has made a comparable innovation.

Re: What’s so hard about understanding consciousness?

#73

Post by grumbel »

Aardwolf wrote: post #7
xweber wrote: post #2

Thanks for the link. I agree with Seth that consciousness is much like a controlled hallucination - after all, we don't experience reality directly, but through the predictions of our brain. But then the question is, why do you need this hallucination? I suspect that consciousness evolved because it makes an organism more capable than one who doesn't. But what does consciousness offer over just taking in sensory inpu…

Explanations like "consciousness is a controlled hallucination" or "consciousness is just an illusion" don't answer anything for me. To be able to have a hallucination or an illusion, you still need the consciousness experiencing that. Explain that consciousness. > I suspect that consciousness evolved because it makes an organism more capable than one who doesn't. You can't prove consciousness from behavior (afaik),…

> "consciousness is just an illusion"

Replace "illusion" with "perception" and it will make a lot more sense.

Consciousness does obviously exist in one form or another, but when people think intuitively about consciousness they imagine it as an actor. A little guy in your head that looks at the world and makes decisions.

That's the illusion. That "little guy", that "self", isn't the one doing the work, your brain is the one doing the work. The little guy is a how the brain tries to make sens of itself.

Just like photons hitting your eyeballs might be interpreted as cats and dogs out there in the world, the brain interprets or perceives whatever it is doing internally as a "self".

> You can't prove consciousness from behavior (afaik)

Without some sens of self any creature would have a pretty difficult time surviving, as it wouldn't be able to tell itself apart from the rest of the world.

Re: What’s so hard about understanding consciousness?

#74

Post by simonh »

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.

Fellow materialist here. For me materialism, and more specifically a strong degree of determinism, is the only coherent solution to the problem of responsibility and agency.

After all, if my decisions do not flow from my state, including my experience, memories, preferences, etc, how can we say they are meaningfully mine? I fully accept a degree of randomness in the process, quantum mechanics is a thing, but randomness is just noise. No determinism, no agency.

Re: What’s so hard about understanding consciousness?

#75

Post by tremon »

FeepingCreature wrote: post #4
xweber wrote: post #2

Thanks for the link. I agree with Seth that consciousness is much like a controlled hallucination - after all, we don't experience reality directly, but through the predictions of our brain. But then the question is, why do you need this hallucination? I suspect that consciousness evolved because it makes an organism more capable than one who doesn't. But what does consciousness offer over just taking in sensory inpu…

I think the important part is that you can represent more things in consciousness than just "five-sense data", ie. exotic sense data like emotions, reactions, imagination, memory, impulses, selfhood, and correlate them with the ordinary sensory data. A non-conscious animal may see a predator and get scared, but I don't know if it knows that it's scared because of the predator. I think you need an integrated space for…

A non-conscious animal may see a predator and get scared

This is maybe just a matter of definition, but I find it highly unlikely that that scenario exists. "Seeing" a predator already requires so much higher-level processing (not just the visual cues, but the analysis and classification) that I find it unlikely the animal does not have a working distinction between intra-body and outside-world sensations.

The problem with defining "consciousness" is that we do not have reliable inter-species communication to compare notes between species, so our definition of consciousness itself is hampered by the ability to communicate that sense of consciousness to each other. Already in your post, there's seven different interpretations of what "consciousness" could actually mean:

- ability to recall past experiences ("emotions", "memory")

- awareness of the self ("impulses", "selfhood")

- ability to conceive experiences that do not correspond with sensory inputs ("imagination")

- meta-awareness of instinctual reactions ("if it knows that it's scared because of the predator")

- introspection ("our ability to understand our own interests and behaviors")

- empathy ("and those of others")

- communicating our sense of self to others ("express them with language")

Personally, I think we should assume that all animal species possess the first four, all large mammals can do the first five, and many species have the ability to do the sixth (it's been proven in dogs, apes, parrots, crows, and dolphins -- and probably others).

Re: What’s so hard about understanding consciousness?

#76

Post by simonh »

abernard1 wrote: post #58
zozbot234 wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

For me, material reality is tied to the notion that the world is consistent and conducive to analytical reasoning, that it functions like a machine. It has components which relate to each other in consistent ways that we can model and understand. The fact that these components are best described by field equations rather than newtonian mechanics is incidental.

The main alternative viewpoint to materialism, dualism, posits some further 'external' influence that acts on the world to account for phenomena we poorly understand like consciousness, and for some people psychic or religious phenomena. I think that's just fuzzy thinking, and I don't even really know what they mean. How can something not 'of the world' interact with the world? Surely 'the world' is everything that can act on or influence each other, right? I'm not sure how else to define it.

Re: What’s so hard about understanding consciousness?

#77

Post by pessimizer »

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.

Count me as a P-Zombie. I think the reason that consciousness is a hard problem is that it's largely used as a word referring to nothing in particular, and as such can be argued about endlessly.

The real problem is locality. Why am I located in me instead of in you? Why is it so much easier for me to see out of my eyes than it is for me to see out of yours? What's the connection between my perspective and my body?

The idea that self-awareness/consciousness ("I am me") is the big problem is weird. I have no problem locating that in the material world. If I program a computer to poll all of its peripherals, report on its RAM and processors, and adjust how it runs its programs based on that, that's as much self-awareness as I have, if not more.

Re: What’s so hard about understanding consciousness?

#78

Post by throwawayguy7 »

What this article and most others lack is an adult treatment of why serious neuroscientists and philosphers of the mind feel the problem is in fact, hard.

To me, the fact that illusion and hallucination are being invoked is strong evidence of handwaving being engaged in to dismiss an otherwise difficult problem. This is not a scientifically rigorous explanation and it doesn't take the other side seriously.

As a younger guy, I read Dennet and mistook him for a serious thinker. Then I read his rebuttals of his opponents and all he did was accuse them of 'residual christianity' and make profane acrostic poems. These guys just aren't taking the other side seriously and it's kinda silly honestly.

Re: What’s so hard about understanding consciousness?

#79

Post by whaaswijk »

misja111 wrote: post #51
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.

Serious question: how can consciousness be an illusion? I’m not even sure what that would mean. One could argue that many things are illusory (e.g. the external world). But it’s quite hard to dismiss the notion of actual experience occurring in the world. Our experiences could lead us to false conclusions, sure, but we cannot deny their existence.

Re: What’s so hard about understanding consciousness?

#80

Post by hamilyon2 »

misja111 wrote: post #59
Sosh101 wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think I understand what gp means. He is trying to point to a contradiction in ggp reasoning. The question is in the definition of words "subjective" and "observer". You cannot define an observer using the concept of observer, that's circular reasoning. "Incredibly complex neural automata" is just handwaving the problem away. Equivalent of saying "here the magic happens", not an explanation.
Post reply on HN