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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?

#101

Post by beardedetim »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #93

Like Dennett in "Consciousness Explained", both of these authors seem almost entirely focused on what we are conscious of rather than the fact that we are conscious of anything at all. Their descriptions of their work are all centered on the question of what it is that we actually experience. This is is a fascinating question, and entirely worthy of investigation. But it is not the same question as: how is it possibl…

I think they're two sides of the same coin.

_How_ do we have any experience will be more easily answered the more we know about _what_ we actually experience. And _what_ we experience is predicated upon _how_ we experience it. I agree both need investigating.

The _bigger_ question I see the coin representing is _who or what_ is experiencing in the first place? The way I see it, it's not really _a thing_ experiencing _something_ but instead _things_ experiencing _things_ at _times_.

Re: What’s so hard about understanding consciousness?

#102

Post by guerrilla »

zubspace wrote: post #96
guerrilla wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

The interesting bit is not the sensory input. We mostly know how the sensors work and how they are triggered. The fun question is, what exactly is connected to those sensors and experiences them and where is the location of that thing? It's like we're sitting with a VR headset in our brain, playing that game we call life. But, where exactly are we and how is that headset connected to our sensors?

> The fun question is, what exactly is connected to those sensors and experiences them and where is the location of that thing?

Again, your body.

Think about it. Your body is experiencing what your brain has generated out of your sensory input.

You don't need a homunculus, you are a body. You are your body and there's nothing else to you.

Re: What’s so hard about understanding consciousness?

#103

Post by guerrilla »

shrimp_emoji wrote: post #100
guerrilla wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

And then step into the Star Trek transporter. :) You're obliterated, then perfectly reassembled on the other side. Is that still "you", "subjectively"? Should you or others even care about that question? And, if not, damn, that's ego-killing af.

My answer is yes but it depends on your theory of identity. Unless you're positing a soul or something though, your answer is probably going to have to be yes.

Re: What’s so hard about understanding consciousness?

#104

Post by whaaswijk »

jbotz wrote: post #89
whaaswijk wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 li…

If I understand correctly, you're referring to the "easy" problem of consciousness, i.e. the "mechanistic" explanation of how a self could be constructed by the brain. That's an interesting question and I think your take is a coherent and plausible one (from a materialistic perspective). However, I still think this doesn't get around the hard problem of why these interactions actually feel like anything. I've never heard a satisfying materialistic explanation of that. Do you believe the interactions could in principle be implemented on any Turing machine? Or are they substrate dependent?

Re: What’s so hard about understanding consciousness?

#105

Post by [deleted] »

throwawayguy7 wrote: post #78

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 young…

[deleted]

Re: What’s so hard about understanding consciousness?

#106

Post by xpuente »

The right analogy is trying to understand why your favorite OS works, by trying to understand why certain window appears when you click in certain region of the screen. You need to understand up to certain level the underlying mechanisms (e.g. if you want to understand how an OS works, you need how a syscall works, then you need to understand how the processor works).

All this philosophical labyrinth of words seems futile. We need to have a right system level model of the cortex and subcortical structures to progress. I feel like we are trying to resolve this problem looking at the quantum effects in the transistors (using the previously cited analogy) [neuroscience] and looking to a datacenter [cognitive science]. We need to choose the right level of abstraction. We haven't figured out what is the right one in the last 100 year. We will do... and perhaps discover that Cortico-thalamic pathway in the von Neumman base of our OS...

Re: What’s so hard about understanding consciousness?

#107

Post by pessimizer »

guerrilla wrote: post #86
pessimizer wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I understand that. It's my body that's doing the thinking, and my body that's typing this comment. The question is why there's some sort of proximity that I have with my comment that I don't have to yours.

Re: What’s so hard about understanding consciousness?

#108

Post by pessimizer »

guerrilla wrote: post #102
zubspace wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The interesting bit is not the sensory input. We mostly know how the sensors work and how they are triggered. The fun question is, what exactly is connected to those sensors and experiences them and where is the location of that thing? It's like we're sitting with a VR headset in our brain, playing that game we call life. But, where exactly are we and how is that headset connected to our sensors?

> The fun question is, what exactly is connected to those sensors and experiences them and where is the location of that thing? Again, your body. Think about it. Your body is experiencing what your brain has generated out of your sensory input. You don't need a homunculus, you are a body. You are your body and there's nothing else to you.

For me it's worse. I don't think theres any reason to identify my perspective with any homunculus. It's watching somebody play a game, not playing it. My question is this: I "know" there are a lot of games being played - why am I watching this one?

Re: What’s so hard about understanding consciousness?

#109

Post by guerrilla »

pessimizer wrote: post #107
guerrilla wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I understand that. It's my body that's doing the thinking, and my body that's typing this comment. The question is why there's some sort of proximity that I have with my comment that I don't have to yours.

I can't conceive of how there couldn't be. Your body gets sensory input, generates your mind and then your body experiences your mind. How could that possibly be dislocated from your body... The very idea is nonsense.

Re: What’s so hard about understanding consciousness?

#110

Post by pessimizer »

shrimp_emoji wrote: post #100
guerrilla wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

And then step into the Star Trek transporter. :) You're obliterated, then perfectly reassembled on the other side. Is that still "you", "subjectively"? Should you or others even care about that question? And, if not, damn, that's ego-killing af.

Or even without transporters: what evidence do I have that the me that ended this sentence is the same me that began it? If anything, I have material evidence that it isn't.
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