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

161–170 of 393 posts

Re: What’s so hard about understanding consciousness?

#161

Post by psyc »

bondarchuk wrote: post #153
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.

I hardly think Chalmers (and others) forgot to define what the problem is. It's more likely you haven't read and/or understood them.

Re: What’s so hard about understanding consciousness?

#162

Post by [deleted] »

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,…

[deleted]

Re: What’s so hard about understanding consciousness?

#163

Post by psyc »

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.

This is such a non-sequitur. I can't tell if you're referring to people choosing not to be conscious (I doubt that's possible) or choosing not to ponder on it (I don't think that's relevant). If people don't want to think about it, that's easily avoided. What we're talking about is people expending serious thought, "tying themselves in knots" as you say, to write essays and sometimes tomes dissuading others from pondering it either because "there's no hard problem" or "it's not productive."

Re: What’s so hard about understanding consciousness?

#164

Post by aeternum »

dkersten wrote: post #158
krapp wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It takes surprisingly little effort to trick your consciousness. VR isn't even that good yet in terms of resolution and it's quite convincing. If you were put in a VR headset as a child and given a dogs body or something it's doubtful you could tell the difference.

A similar feeling is present when flying FPV drones. A good pilot typically feels like they are the drone. Your mind immediately separates the drone from the rest of the environment because it responds to your control input and matches visual perception.

Re: What’s so hard about understanding consciousness?

#165

Post by ChikkaChiChi »

qwerty456127 wrote: post #71
misja111 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 wher…

I understand your point, but if we truly are "Ships of Thesus" in meat form, then is consciousness only a present moment phenomena that can merely tap into our biological record-keeping?

We may be relying too heavily on the basis that our experience and our sense of being are a combination that begets consciousness; when they may just as likely be separate systems.

Re: What’s so hard about understanding consciousness?

#167

Post by foobarian »

zubspace wrote: post #41
krapp wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I can completely follow your logic. And I completely agree that going supernatural or decending into a soul-debate is not constructive. That was not my intent. Still, you and I can probably agree to some extent, that there is an inner eye inside of our heads looking outside. It also makes sense to me, that those processes could spawn from a feedback loop inside of a brain. Still. why did this inner eye spawn in this…

I have a lot of trouble with that exact question. It's no wonder the concept of a 'soul' is so pervasive over the ages - it explains things so neatly. It's like there is a cosmic Kubernetes cluster and at birth a process gets randomly assigned to a CPU.

Re: What’s so hard about understanding consciousness?

#168

Post by neosat »

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…

exactly ^. The first central question is "how is it possible that we have any experience at all?" That leads naturally to the other important question "who is the observer that's aware" i.e. who is the "we"/I that is aware.

It's telling that science has made incredible progress (e.g. in the last 100 years) but on questions such as these above, we know little more than people knew then. Although we do know a lot more about the mechanics of what and how we experiences things.

Re: What’s so hard about understanding consciousness?

#169

Post by psyc »

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.

I won't be disappointed if it turns out to be an illusion. I suspect it's in the nature of consciousness to be comprised of many illusions, in fact. But I'm still waiting on an explanation for the illusion. Now, if you tell me the illusions prevents us from ever understanding the illusion, then I will be disappointed.

Re: What’s so hard about understanding consciousness?

#170

Post by alecst »

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…

Sounds like you're in agreement then? I don't see how it's backwards. The quoted text says nothing about decision-making or weighing pros and cons.
Post reply on HN