What’s so hard about understanding consciousness? • Hacker News Board

Re: What’s so hard about understanding consciousness?

#151

Post by bondarchuk » Fri, Feb 04, 2022, 5:52 PM UTC

ed-209 wrote: post #45

Theorizing about the nature of consciousness without having been subjected to it's multitude of altered states is an obvious waste of time. If you can't or won't venture into the "field", then at least have the humility to address the aggregate experiential data of those who have.

The trouble is that the sort of drug-induced insight (or pseudo-insight as some would call it) you refer to is usually accompanied by strong euphoric effects, which impairs your ability to dryly reason about those experiences even a long time after the fact. Nor can I completely shake the impression that those who believe a e.g. a DMT trip offers genuine insight into the nature of consciousness simply had an insufficient grasp of the subject beforehand.

Re: What’s so hard about understanding consciousness?

#152

Post by bondarchuk » Fri, Feb 04, 2022, 5:53 PM UTC

bekantan wrote: post #42

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.

Honest question: following this argument, is it to be expected that a sufficiently complex water pipeline can become conscious?

Of course. This is table stakes and has been since the early 1700's. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leibniz%27s_gap

Re: What’s so hard about understanding consciousness?

#153

Post by bondarchuk » Fri, Feb 04, 2022, 5:54 PM UTC

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.

Very funny, of course, but one can easily reply that those who do believe consciousness is a hard problem are just deluding themselves. Especially when (as is usually the case) a clear definition of the concept "hard problem" is not even given.

Re: What’s so hard about understanding consciousness?

#154

Post by stevofolife » Fri, Feb 04, 2022, 5:55 PM UTC

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…

Is a computer going to ask why am I operating on this specific CPU and not on the other CPU that is located in a server rack 2 meters away from it?

To be honest, I don’t get what you are really trying to understand or find out here.

Re: What’s so hard about understanding consciousness?

#155

Post by dibujante » Fri, Feb 04, 2022, 6:00 PM UTC

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…

Yeah, this is the real question. I'm sure I could program an AI agent to respond to (dis-)incentives in a fuzzy way. Is it consciously experiencing pain and pleasure at that point? The answer would be "no" unless we could prove it.

Re: What’s so hard about understanding consciousness?

#156

Post by Dangeranger » Fri, Feb 04, 2022, 6:01 PM UTC

My completely uneducated opinion on this, is that our consciousness is an emergent property of our subconscious, and that our subconscious is an emergent property of the physics of our brain’s electrical signals.

This opinion is almost certainly wrong, but it’s helped me while thinking about my own mind and experiences.

Re: What’s so hard about understanding consciousness?

#157

Post by carapace » Fri, Feb 04, 2022, 6:03 PM UTC

ncmncm wrote: post #139

carapace wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> people who think that consciousness is not a hard problem are P-Zombies that can't experience the problem I've come to the same conclusion. Meaning no disrespect or insult to them, it seems to me that it must be the case that some folks just haven't noticed themselves. P.D. Ouspensky talks about learning to "remember myself" in "In Search of the Miraculous" and describes how it was for him to practice changing from…

> "some folks just haven't noticed themselves" Some folks don't enjoy tying themselves in knots. You are absolutely welcome to spend your precious seconds of limited life on it, but it doesn't make you superior, however much you would like to think it does. It's just a choice, like between working and playing.

I didn't say anything about "superior".

Is being a "P-Zombie" inferior to being self-aware? By what metric could such a comparison be made? Is the water inferior to the wave?

Also, "tying themselves in knots" != "noticed themselves", if anything it's the opposite: all knots untie.

Re: What’s so hard about understanding consciousness?

#158

Post by dkersten » Fri, Feb 04, 2022, 6:05 PM UTC

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…

> Is it possible to transfer consciousness from one entity to another? transfer, no, because consciousness is inextricably linked to the brain.

What if we can transplant the brain itself? The consciousness is still contained in and created by the same brain, but every other part of the experience (sensory input) are from another body effectively transferring consciousness between bodies.

Re: What’s so hard about understanding consciousness?

#159

Post by asveikau » Fri, Feb 04, 2022, 6:07 PM UTC

lisper wrote: post #14

> If you are feeling pain, for example, this gives you very actionable knowledge about what you should do next in order to survive. This seems exactly backwards to me. The visceral sensation of pain exists precisely in order to bypass your conscious decision-making. When you're hurting, your body doesn't want you to start weighing the pros and cons of various courses of action, it wants you to deal with the injury ri…

I've read some things suggesting that nonphysical pain can be registered in the brain similar to physical pain. A text message can certainly impact you in a similar way.

Just as an example... Imagine somebody with PTSD. Let's say they get a text message that suggests to them, even indirectly, that their trauma is about to repeat. They may feel pretty intense physical danger and an urgency to intervene that makes no logical sense.

Re: What’s so hard about understanding consciousness?

#160

Post by aeternum » Fri, Feb 04, 2022, 6:12 PM UTC

Sosh101 wrote: post #50

lisper wrote: post #14

> If you are feeling pain, for example, this gives you very actionable knowledge about what you should do next in order to survive. This seems exactly backwards to me. The visceral sensation of pain exists precisely in order to bypass your conscious decision-making. When you're hurting, your body doesn't want you to start weighing the pros and cons of various courses of action, it wants you to deal with the injury ri…

I agree with you. But it seems that pain probably existed before higher reasoning (since it's a associated with the older parts of the brain), so it's a bit of a puzzle. Maybe early on the pain mechanisms existed without the associated qualia, or maybe pain also forces other control systems to be bypassed.

An imperfect but generally good model of the brain is the basic/reptilian portion still in control by default, but with the higher reasoning able to act as an override.

This is why it takes effort to do something like ignore pain, say no to candy bars, etc.