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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?

#191

Post by naasking »

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…

> This seems exactly backwards to me. The visceral sensation of pain exists precisely in order to bypass your conscious decision-making.

That quote is not about conscious decision making, it's about how the experience of pain motivates action that is adaptive to survival. If pain didn't feel like anything, but was instead just some light bulb that went off in your head, your ancestors could easily ignore it to their evolutionary detriment.

Therefore it makes sense that pain feels like something you want to avoid so it's not something you can just ignore without considerable effort.

Re: What’s so hard about understanding consciousness?

#192

Post by mannykannot »

pessimizer wrote: post #125
guerrilla wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't gish gallop. > What does it mean for a body to be "mine?" You are your body. > So - does water flowing down a hill have a perspective? Where is it located? Why would it? Does it sense and produce a mind? Not that I'm aware of. You could go the pansychism route if you want though. See David Chalmers or something. > can I say that I'm any less the water as I am my hands, even though I'm controlling the water, get…

I'm not intending to. I wasn't proposing all of that as separable questions. I was proposing it as a series of statements that I have no material means to say anything about. > Why would it? Does it sense and produce a mind? I don't know what a mind is supposed to be in this context, or its importance. I don't identify my perspective with my thoughts. My thoughts are something a body does. My perspective is just my l…

I cannot guess what point you are trying to make here, but I do know that 'location' is not a synonym for 'perspective'.

If you are going to ask questions, you should at least be able to justify their relevance, if asked.

Re: What’s so hard about understanding consciousness?

#193

Post by naasking »

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…

> 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?

This seems no more puzzling or interesting than asking why your web browser is running on your computer rather than mine. Of course the computation must be contained within the computational system that's running it.

Re: What’s so hard about understanding consciousness?

#194

Post by tremon »

Aardwolf wrote: post #135
grumbel wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 exis…

> Well, which part doesn't it explain? It doesn't explain how consciousness emerges from this. Brains/computers/processes can self-reference or self-explain all they want, that still doesn't say how doing so results in having the actual consciousness you experience. It's not a trivial thing we're talking about here: there could be a brain just executing logic and making decisions, or there could be that same brain bu…

If you have a model that says the brain is a singular entity there will always be problems how to phrase meta-activity such as self-awareness and consciousness. If the brain is singular, what does the observing? Does the observing part belong to the brain or not? If the brain is observing itself, which part does the observing and which is the observed? Can we change the roles, and make the observee the observer? How does "the brain" decide what "the brain" is thinking about?

The problem with this model is that it's regarding the brain as a whole as if it's a single processing entity, since that's how we experience it, but physically that's far from the truth: the brain is a highly segmented parallel processing machine and (for as far as I know) there is no clear control hierarchy within the brain to point at a single location to say "this is where [thought/sensation/self] originates".

So my theory is that consciousness is the emergent property of many separate specialized brain areas responding to and interacting with each other: either directly (neuronal links), via the body (flexing a muscle tightens the skin, creating a sensory feedback loop), and through the world (turning your head changes what your eyes perceive).

So speaking in terms of functionality, there is no "brain" as a single entity. The brain is like an ant colony, using hormones and electrical impulses to keep its disparate parts acting in unity. Under this model, consciousness can be defined as the push and pull between these parts, and self-awareness as the consensus model under which the separate parts reached some equilibrium. You won't have problems defining which parts do the observing and which parts are observed: what we "experience" as our mind is the tug-of-war between the processing areas, not the processor activities themselves. And similarly, what we experience as consciousness is the ability of our "mind" to drown out that cacophony and purposefully cede control ("focus") to different brain areas at different times.

Of course, there's no evidence that any of this is true, and there's still plenty of questions about the mechanism through which this would happen, but for me personally this model has allowed me to move on from the vicious cycle of having to first define "brain" in order to define "thought" in order to define "awareness" in order to define "mind" in order to define "self" in order to define "brain".

Re: What’s so hard about understanding consciousness?

#195

Post by visarga »

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…

> But it is not the same question as: how is it possible that we have any experience at all?

Let me send this ball straight back to you.

In the morning when you wake up what happens? You might take something to eat. How would you find the kitchen, how would you recognise the food, or even know you need it? Of course, you are conscious. That's how.

It is possible to be conscious because otherwise your body wouldn't be able to survive. It's essential for avoiding death. We are self replicators in a limited resource environment, after all. This balance between self replication and death evolved consciousness as an evolutionary advantage.

Being exposed to your internal and external environment is the source of consciousness. Even a single cell can seek nutrients or avoid bad places, or decide when to replicate, it has a rudiment of consciousness. But panpsychism? It's one step away from new age babble. Stones are just stones.

Re: What’s so hard about understanding consciousness?

#196

Post by Osiris »

I do Brazilian Jiu Jitsu and a common submission technique is to cut off blood flow to the brain (known as a blood choke).

I've lost consciousness twice after being put into a blood choke. The experience of regaining consciousness is visceral. For those that haven't experienced it, it's very much like a turning on a computer.

Initially, your brain does not (or cannot) process input like vision, sound, touch, etc. Slowly, over about 30-60 seconds, you begin to see and hear but they don't make any sense. You've completely lost the context of who and where you are. Then you begin to recognize colors and shapes, sounds of voices, etc. Eventually, you see and hear everything but still haven't built a concept of the context. Lastly, your brain seems to begin making sense of all the inputs and you regain full conscious awareness.

If you think it's just like waking up from a dream or from a nap, you're wrong. It's a completely different experience, one that's so profound that I distinctly remember the entire episode even years later (and I have poor memory recall generally).

Re: What’s so hard about understanding consciousness?

#197

Post by naasking »

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…

> 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.

Dennett doesn't dismiss the difficulty of the problem, he just dismisses that the difficulty is where people think it is. For instance, he would fully agree that the brain is insanely complex and just elaborating how information processing works will be very, very challenging. His opponents then say from this position of ignorance on how this works, "but even if you explain all of this, there's still something left to explain!"

Is there really though? How could they possibly know this? It's a classic god of the gaps argument/argument from ignorance that theists use to cling to their deities or support intelligent design, hence "residual christianity". After all of this time debating consciousness, the very best arguments we have for qualia that cannot be captured mechanistically are thought experiments that are easily dismissed as circular (and which Dennett has ably deconstructed to show their vacuousness).

Frankly, I find Dennett's rebuttals are brutally logical and pragmatic.

Re: What’s so hard about understanding consciousness?

#198

Post by ncmncm »

psyc wrote: post #178
ncmncm wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am talking about choosing to tie yourself in knots and thereby preventing any further progress toward understanding what you are talking about. You could also choose not to tie yourself in knots, and then you would not be blocked, and could begin to make sense.

That makes more sense, thanks. But philosophers of mind, neuroscientists, cognitive scientists, and all could just as well pursue other lines of inquiry without protesting too much that there's no hard problem.

If you think there is a hard problem, it is on you to articulate one. Thus far I have not encountered one that does not depend on undefined words or circular arguments, i.e. knots.

Re: What’s so hard about understanding consciousness?

#199

Post by nh23423fefe »

Osiris wrote: post #196

I do Brazilian Jiu Jitsu and a common submission technique is to cut off blood flow to the brain (known as a blood choke). I've lost consciousness twice after being put into a blood choke. The experience of regaining consciousness is visceral. For those that haven't experienced it, it's very much like a turning on a computer. Initially, your brain does not (or cannot) process input like vision, sound, touch, etc. Slo…

That sounds like a slow motion version of waking from anesthesia.

Waking from sleep feels very fast, but I've been put under for surgery more than once now, and coming around from surgery doesn't feel like waking up. It feels like something else completely.

Re: What’s so hard about understanding consciousness?

#200

Post by bigcat123 »

Osiris wrote: post #196

I do Brazilian Jiu Jitsu and a common submission technique is to cut off blood flow to the brain (known as a blood choke). I've lost consciousness twice after being put into a blood choke. The experience of regaining consciousness is visceral. For those that haven't experienced it, it's very much like a turning on a computer. Initially, your brain does not (or cannot) process input like vision, sound, touch, etc. Slo…

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