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

81–90 of 393 posts

Re: What’s so hard about understanding consciousness?

#81

Post by ca98am79 »

I think it is impossible to understand Consciousness because Consciousness creates the brain and the whole universe.

If you think of Consciousness as the thing that is first and which creates all the rest, it answers a lot of hard questions - questions like why is it so hard to even define Consciousness?

Or weird paradoxes in QM.

Or things like: why do we all share the present moment?

Once you start to see Consciousness as the foundation of everything, it all makes a lot more sense. Everything fits together much more easily.

A lot of religions have also come to this conclusion.

There is a book called Biocentrism by Robert Lanza, which I thought was really good and went into details about this.

Re: What’s so hard about understanding consciousness?

#82

Post by Aardwolf »

grumbel wrote: post #73
Aardwolf wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 little guy is a how the brain tries to make sens of itself.

That still doesn't explain consciousness itself. Though I think there are many different interpretations and definitions for the word consciousness so we might be talking about a different one.

> 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.

A cell just replicates because that's what the molecules in it happen to do

Re: What’s so hard about understanding consciousness?

#85

Post by pessimizer »

simonh wrote: post #76
abernard1 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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, p…

I'm pragmatically a materialist, just because I don't find use in speculating about the immaterial (by definition.) But although I thought I was so much smarter than Descartes when I was younger, I still can't figure out why I'm in me and not as much in you, and somehow partially in the computer I'm typing on. That I'm more in my head than in my hands, but I'm in both.

I really have no access to that. I've just taken a couple of extreme positions, and hope that one day somebody can come up with some way to reduce or test them materially, although I accept that I can't even speculate about a way to do it.

One is a panpsychism. The material world exists within a substrate of perspectives, and as material objects pass through them, the perspectives momentarily attach to those objects, and whatever is mechanically connected to them. This happens at an arbitrary rate (depending on the density of the perspective substrate and the relative speed of the material passing through it.) If we call the amount of time that a perspective is located "centrally" enough in a human nervous system to have access to it a "moment," then for a moment, that perspective thinks it is me. This assumes that perspectives are distinct for purposes of explanation, but they don't have to be - maybe an infinite number of perspectives think that they are me at any particular moment, and in the next moment, an entirely different set.

The other is that there's a particular geometry of electromagnetic activity that captures perspectives, and minds happen to conform to that geometry.

I don't think these are any more insightful than "the soul talks to bodies through the pineal gland." I can only hold onto them as more abstract and generalized. There's no material way to tell when you've captured a perspective, and we each only know of the existence of one with certainty. We could be Buddhist and say that the universe is one fragmented confused perspective, or say that we're a bunch of islands; either way, we have no material basis for those beliefs. The only thing we know is that we're not P-Zombies. We don't know that others aren't P-Zombies, just us.

Re: What’s so hard about understanding consciousness?

#86

Post by guerrilla »

pessimizer wrote: post #77
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? Th…

> What's the connection between my perspective and my body?

Your body is doing the experiencing. It is what's perceiving.

Your mind is just your body's UI for the world and your body is the user.

Re: What’s so hard about understanding consciousness?

#87

Post by mannykannot »

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…

> The current understanding of entanglement in QM is indistinguishable from math. And then we need to ask: are the equations real?

Well, they predict what we observe, which is not a property of math in general.

Re: What’s so hard about understanding consciousness?

#88

Post by guerrilla »

whaaswijk wrote: post #79
misja111 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Either it's inane wordplay or it's obviously nonsense for most definitions of conscious. An illusion must be perceived, so in that sense the proposition is self-refuting. Also, you have empirical evidence against it: you know when you're conscious and that sometimes you aren't (and that it's a spectrum.) Thirdly, you can behaviorally define conscious. Fourthly, if I'm not mistaken, you can measure its presence neurologically. To say that all of this is an illusion is stupidity or being very obtuse for attention (like clickbait.)

Re: What’s so hard about understanding consciousness?

#89

Post by jbotz »

whaaswijk wrote: post #79
misja111 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The experiences are real, but the homunculus behind your eyes that you think of as yourself is an illusion. In reality there are a bunch of fairly independent processes talking to each other, sharing the perceptions, reacting to them, feedback from those reactions again become a perception, a "narrator" process that often gives running commentary in your mother-tongue, etc. The interaction of those processes feels like a unified thing, "you", and that's the illusion. This illusion has adaptive advantages, because it helps the organism take care of its needs, so evolution selects for it.

That's my take, maybe not exactly the same as Damasio and Seth's, but compatible with theirs.

Re: What’s so hard about understanding consciousness?

#90

Post by grumbel »

Aardwolf wrote: post #82
grumbel wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "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 little guy is a how the brain tries to make sens of itself. That still doesn't explain consciousness itself. Though I think there are many different interpretations and definitions for the word consciousness so we might be talking about a different one. > 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. A…

> That still doesn't explain consciousness itself.

Well, which part doesn't it explain? It's pretty conclusive as far as I am concerned. As among other things, you can explain why philosophers would even ask that question in the first place.

> A cell just replicates because that's what the molecules in it happen to do

And transistors just go on and off, yet people still spend years studying computer science. The existence of simple mechanism at one level doesn't prevent higher order mechanism at another, quite the opposite. Those cells aren't going to do much replicating when you get killed by a tiger, some awareness of yourself and the environment helps prevent that.

Post reply on HN