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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?

#281

Post by krapp »

mensetmanusman wrote: post #267
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…

The universe is incredibly intelligible and follows invisible laws. That, per definition, is a supernatural observation since we can’t touch the invisible laws.

>That, per definition, is a supernatural observation since we can’t touch the invisible laws.

The definition of supernatural is that which exists outside of the order of nature, not that which is only explicitly tangible. Natural laws are human-created abstractions which explain the observed behaviors of the natural world, which by definition makes them natural, not supernatural.

Re: What’s so hard about understanding consciousness?

#282

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

abletonlive wrote: post #238
harperlee wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Yes but see, in your example, I would then say your fingers are conscious, too. Or that there is an experience of being a finger. Who, besides the finger, could say otherwise? Just because you've moved the experience from me having it, to the finger having it, doesn't mean that the experience disappeared. The problem is yet again w/ the definition of having an experience, as I said in my reply to the parent. It's jus…

It's not just language. I doubt that you think it is like anything to be a rock. You do think that it is like something to be a person (or even a finger)! Those are two different states of existence, one with experiences/qualia (i.e. it is like something to be that thing) and one without. How do we explain the difference.

ps. interesting user name.

Re: What’s so hard about understanding consciousness?

#283

Post by davidhs »

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?

From what I can best tell, consciousness is a property or a set of simulated properties, I don't really know what it is and I guess we won't have good answers for it until we will be able to properly simulate something like a brain and have better brain theories to explain it.

But the world you find yourself is a simulation, and your body is simulated. Everything you consciously experience is simulated. This simulation is running inside your brain. Part of your brain is trying to explain its input so it makes models to predict its inputs. I think it learns a model of your body, and your mind, and how these thing relate to each other and how they relate to what you experience "out there".

> I love to think about stuff like this, but are those questions even answerable?

Yes. (I think so)

Re: What’s so hard about understanding consciousness?

#284

Post by PeterisP »

CallidusAsinus wrote: post #239

In my experience, when reading about consciousness there are a couple types of claims you should be cautious of: 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.…

> "Can this possibly help explain how I can merge consciousness with someone (or something) else?"

Wait, what? Why do you suppose that you can merge consciousness with someone (or something) else, can you elaborate on that? The split-brain patients are cases with presumably separate consciousnesses that are not merged and AFAIK never get merged, especially after corpus callosotomy which would make it physically impossible, wouldn't it?

Re: What’s so hard about understanding consciousness?

#285

Post by spookthesunset »

chasd00 wrote: post #264
foobarian wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That line of explanation doesn't do it for me, because there is only one brain that has my FPV consciousness. Why this particular one? I think it's a question related to the topics of breaking symmetry, or nondeterminism. It's also a great unsolved question that many smarter people than me couldn't answer so I'm not hopeful I'll live to see it answered. But I will continue to wonder at it now and then, like when arti…

> there is only one brain that has my FPV consciousness. Why this particular one? to me, the answer is because you were born with that one. Maybe it's better to think about how your FPV consciousness didn't exist prior to your birth. It came into being when you came into being. I don't think there's a separation between your FPV consciousness and physical brain. If your metabolism stops your FPV consciousness stops

> Maybe it's better to think about how your FPV consciousness didn't exist prior to your birth

That is unknowable though. You may just not remember it. Is memory what makes consciousness?

Re: What’s so hard about understanding consciousness?

#286

Post by davidhs »

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 don't think consciousness is an embodied phenomenon. It's probably just a property or set of properties of the simulated world that we find ourselves in (the simulated world running on the brain).

To me, embodiment such and such seems pseudoscientific. How is it possible at this point in time that anything inside your pinky toe might be influencing the activity of your brain without sending nerve signals to the brain or secreting something into its surrounding which might eventually signal the brain? By some spooky magic?

Re: What’s so hard about understanding consciousness?

#287

Post by mensetmanusman »

krapp wrote: post #281
mensetmanusman wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The universe is incredibly intelligible and follows invisible laws. That, per definition, is a supernatural observation since we can’t touch the invisible laws.

>That, per definition, is a supernatural observation since we can’t touch the invisible laws. The definition of supernatural is that which exists outside of the order of nature, not that which is only explicitly tangible. Natural laws are human-created abstractions which explain the observed behaviors of the natural world, which by definition makes them natural, not supernatural.

“ The definition of supernatural is that which exists outside of the order of nature.”

Natural laws exist without humans, unless one believes the universe disappears without the human to collapse the wave function.

Nature follows these laws, so the laws are abstractly outside of nature.

Re: What’s so hard about understanding consciousness?

#288

Post by davidhs »

ca98am79 wrote: post #81

I think it is impossible to understand Consciousness because Consciousness creates the brain and the whole universe. If you think of Consciousness as the thing that is first and which creates all the rest, it answers a lot of hard questions - questions like why is it so hard to even define Consciousness? Or weird paradoxes in QM. Or things like: why do we all share the present moment? Once you start to see Consciousn…

> I think it is impossible to understand Consciousness because Consciousness creates the brain and the whole universe.

I think it's much more likely that consciousness is a result of brain activity. For example, if consciousness creates the brain and the whole universe, why don't I have any reliable access to what is going on except partially in my immediate vicinity? Also, how can it create such a wonderfully consistent world out there and I can not reliably drive to store because my mind is preoccupied and the rest of me goes on autopilot.

I think you would require fewer bits to explain it the other way around.

Re: What’s so hard about understanding consciousness?

#289

Post by CallidusAsinus »

PeterisP wrote: post #284
CallidusAsinus wrote: post #239

In my experience, when reading about consciousness there are a couple types of claims you should be cautious of: 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.…

> "Can this possibly help explain how I can merge consciousness with someone (or something) else?" Wait, what? Why do you suppose that you can merge consciousness with someone (or something) else, can you elaborate on that? The split-brain patients are cases with presumably separate consciousnesses that are not merged and AFAIK never get merged, especially after corpus callosotomy which would make it physically impos…

Yours is a very reasonable question. First of all, merging consciousness is admittedly a bit woo-woo; however, I feel it's worth considering.

According to the literature, when the corpus callosum is severed, it appears that the verbal part of the patient loses conscious access to parts of their body. However, those lost parts continue functioning independently, and are able to communicate non-verbally.

Put another way, it seems plausible that a conscious system is split into two conscious systems. This could imply the corpus callosum is involved in unifying conscious systems.

Re: What’s so hard about understanding consciousness?

#290

Post by tasty_freeze »

dibujante wrote: post #155
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.

I am sure someone, perhaps you, could create an AI (or just a simple hard-coded program) that responds to (dis)incentives that clearly doesn't experience pain or pleasure.

But that isn't the question. The question it possible that a sufficiently complex program could ever be able to have the experiences in the same way that humans have them (AKA "qualia").

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