231–240 of 393 posts
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"Who is the observer" is not consistent. Maybe "what part of myself is the observer".
who is the observer who is observing myself?
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You don't think it's possible to seek nutrients without having experiences?
I don't believe it is. This is the problem w/ the philosophical zombies, they are self defeating examples and can't exist in anything but a thought experiment. The fact that you're seeking nutrients at all means you can distinguish between sensory input, and therefore are experiencing something. If you can't distinguish between sensory input, then you are not experiencing anything. How can you be an effective seeker…
You are assuming “you” is a unique, atomic thing here.
When your fingers curl due to being immersed in water (which is a neurological thing, not a physical thing!), your conscious mind does not experience the humidity, the finger curling system does. You just experience the effect of the skin curling through sight and touch, afterwards.
There are several other systems in our body that react to an environment that we are barely conscious of, and “barely” is being generous. Those seems like a counterexample of your “we can't not be conscious if we experience”.
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The question is, why did the FPV-experiencing consciousness happen to bind to the body you are in? And why does it stick? I guess it would be interesting to look at why it persists through sleep. And whether there were ever instances of people who wake up with different personalities. Also edge cases around coma/near-death restarts. Or maybe things work like coroutines, and no matter which thread you get assigned to…
> The question is, why did the FPV-experiencing consciousness happen to bind to the body you are in? And why does it stick? You're asking questions equivalent to "why does the interior of a box happen to bind to that particular piece of folded cardboard? And why is the same interior there when the box is closed and reopened?" If each brain has a consciousness, and each is uniquely generated by that brain, the 'bindin…
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I don't believe it is. This is the problem w/ the philosophical zombies, they are self defeating examples and can't exist in anything but a thought experiment. The fact that you're seeking nutrients at all means you can distinguish between sensory input, and therefore are experiencing something. If you can't distinguish between sensory input, then you are not experiencing anything. How can you be an effective seeker…
If I have a material that tightens or loosens based on temperature or chemical gradient, does that count as "sensory input"? I wouldn't say so, since nothing is receiving a signal from it to distinguish, and I also wouldn't say it's causing experiences, but it is enough to seek nutrients for a bacteria or a jellyfish-like creature.
A piece of material is not conscious because it doesn't need to. You see, bacterias are self replicators, humans too. And self replication is resource intensive, while resources are limited. So life becomes a competition. That is why agents need to become more attuned to their state and possible actions and outcomes.
Is that good enough to be called consciousness? Taking sensory inputs, representing your state, taking actions, observing effect, learning from it. Your goal - to exist, to make copies of yourself. If you're not aware of essential information, or don't understand your situation, you die. If you live, it's because you are aware.
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.
Start instead with SE, and then any sort of material universe can be the contents of it.
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If I have a material that tightens or loosens based on temperature or chemical gradient, does that count as "sensory input"? I wouldn't say so, since nothing is receiving a signal from it to distinguish, and I also wouldn't say it's causing experiences, but it is enough to seek nutrients for a bacteria or a jellyfish-like creature.
You're right, a bacteria would sense and follow chemical gradients and light. And that would be a primitive form of consciousness. A piece of material is not conscious because it doesn't need to. You see, bacterias are self replicators, humans too. And self replication is resource intensive, while resources are limited. So life becomes a competition. That is why agents need to become more attuned to their state and p…
It's not interacting with anything else to make those decisions, it's completely autonomous.
> observing effect, learning from it
If something is meaningfully doing that, then we're getting to consciousness. But I'll note that I don't count natural selection as "learning" here.
And observing the results of decisions and learning is not mandatory to survive and reproduce.
Go back a couple billion years before we had life on Earth. There was no life until abiogenesis (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abiogenesis) occurred. Somehow, over the course of a couple billion years, self-replicating molecules turns into single-celled life, then multicellular life, and eventually the complex lifeforms we see today.
But...that still doesn't explain consciousness.
To an external observer, a brain is just a very complex set of electrical and chemical reactions. But to that person, there's a consciousness behind it all. But that consciousness can be altered by drugs and physical injury. It calls into question if anybody actually truly has free will, or if a sufficiently advanced computer could perfectly simulate exactly how a person would react to anything given a perfect snapshot of the wiring of their neurons and states of synapses.
I don't know how to define consciousness in a way that couldn't also be applied to a sufficiently advanced AI/AGI.
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I don't believe it is. This is the problem w/ the philosophical zombies, they are self defeating examples and can't exist in anything but a thought experiment. The fact that you're seeking nutrients at all means you can distinguish between sensory input, and therefore are experiencing something. If you can't distinguish between sensory input, then you are not experiencing anything. How can you be an effective seeker…
> you can distinguish between sensory input, and therefore are experiencing something You are assuming “you” is a unique, atomic thing here. When your fingers curl due to being immersed in water (which is a neurological thing, not a physical thing!), your conscious mind does not experience the humidity, the finger curling system does. You just experience the effect of the skin curling through sight and touch, afterwa…
The problem is yet again w/ the definition of having an experience, as I said in my reply to the parent. It's just language, and the reason why we find ourselves in some kind of linguistic paradox trying to explain it.
1) Claims that the causes of consciousness can be easily explained. As far as I can tell, they can't. Usually these explanations use the word "emergent" a lot, and tend to be linguistically impenetrable. Often more poetic than scientific when scrutinized closely.
2) Claims that consciousness doesn't exist. These arguments often feel like semantic nitpicking, and employ the word "illusion" as though it's somehow useful for explaining why you experience.
My pet criteria for whether a statement about consciousness is useful is: "Can this possibly help explain how I can merge consciousness with someone (or something) else?" To me, this feels like a tangible measurement for how materially useful a claim about consciousness might be. An example is literature on "Split-Brain" patients (such as https://www.nature.com/articles/483260a).
edit: Another category to be wary of is:
3) Claims that we cannot understand consciousness. Usually these boil down to "how can consciousness understand itself?". Poetic and poignant, but not particularly useful or scientifically grounded.
Recently I bought a telescope and took some pictures of the moon. Then I searched for a map of the moon, and to my surprise the orientation didn't match my photos. I imagined myself stading on the right side of the planet, looking at the moon which was also at the right. I realized that my "up" is actually the "side", and my photos and the map made sense. That was like the reorientation feeling, but softer.
That made me think whether one thing is having a theory of this world, and another very different when a theory is deep in our consciousness.