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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?

#291

Post by GeorgeKangas »

naasking wrote: post #228
GeorgeKangas wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"you don't have conscious experience, you only think you do." That's what illusionism , the position of Keith Frankish, asserts. Dennett mostly seems to support it, as you note, but more equivocally than Frankish. For those of us who have subjective experience (SE), and are aware of it: SE is the thing, which we know must exist (as noted by Descartes). Anyone doubting the existence of SE, either is not having SE (i.e…

> Dennett mostly seems to support it, as you note, but more equivocally than Frankish. I believe Dennett is an eliminative materialist, so he would consider qualia to be an illusion. > For those of us who have subjective experience (SE), and are aware of it: SE is the thing, which we know must exist (as noted by Descsartes). Descartes begged the question. Just deconstruct it: " I think therefore I am" presupposes the…

Very well then: you either don't have SE, or don't recognize your own SE. My guess is the latter.

I don't think SE is exclusive to humans, but only humans talk about it, as far as we know.

Re: What’s so hard about understanding consciousness?

#292

Post by davidhs »

pasabagi wrote: post #24

One troubling analogy would be occasionalism. Occasionalists believe that in order for cause and effect to work, God has to intercede. This rather elegantly deals with a whole load of theoretical problems around causal realism. If you were an occasionalist, you might think, if such a thing as a 'god-of-the-gaps' exist, it should be possible to build a device that mimics its powers, a 'god machine'. Such a device woul…

What if we have the misconception of thinking we are a physical person in a physical world that has access to a weird mind? What if instead they physical brain is simulating the universe we find ourselves individually in, and we are only simulated, and we infer a physical world.

You can at least scientifically model and test this.

Re: What’s so hard about understanding consciousness?

#293

Post by taylodl »

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…

I've had the same experience doing Brazilian Jie Jitsu. Very strange experience indeed.

Re: What’s so hard about understanding consciousness?

#295

Post by davidhs »

xweber wrote: post #2

Thanks for the link. I agree with Seth that consciousness is much like a controlled hallucination - after all, we don't experience reality directly, but through the predictions of our brain. But then the question is, why do you need this hallucination? I suspect that consciousness evolved because it makes an organism more capable than one who doesn't. But what does consciousness offer over just taking in sensory inpu…

I think what you mean by reality is physical reality, if so then it is impossible for us to directly experience it. You are a simulated being in a simulated world. The simulated world runs on a physical brain. Everything you experience is "hallucinations," but if your physical brain works normally then they will be constrained to explain the input to the brain. Consciousness is most likely a property or set of properties of this simulation. Some part of your brain make predictive models of its input, and the things that it models is yourself, your current environment, other stuff going on (the mind), how these things relate to each other and such. My guess is that qualia is something like primitives to this simulated world.

Re: What’s so hard about understanding consciousness?

#296

Post by davidhs »

monktastic1 wrote: post #280
davidhs wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, the reason we have experience at all is because that is being simulated by the brain. For me a more interesting question is how it is being simulated by the brain.

If what I'm having is a "simulated experience," then where do "real experiences" exist?

The simulated experience is the real experience.

Re: What’s so hard about understanding consciousness?

#297

Post by alar44 »

p_noumenon wrote: post #248
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…

What you just described sounds exactly like waking up from a dream.

It's nothing like that. Your memory is wiped out, you don't know who you are, you don't know when you are. It's like you're in an alien world, nothing looks familiar. Your ears are kind of buzzing and ringing, your visual field is fucked up, etc. The last layers of your neural network aren't turned on yet. It's pretty weird.

Re: What’s so hard about understanding consciousness?

#298

Post by tasty_freeze »

Sohcahtoa82 wrote: post #237

From how I see it, understanding consciousness is impossible because it's difficult to define and even harder to explain. 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 eventua…

> understanding consciousness is impossible because it's difficult to define and even harder to explain.

For sure there isn't one agreed upon definition of consciousness. On the odd occasion I get in a discussion about it, the first thing I say is: what is your definition of consciousness.

I think given a definition of consciousness, it can be discussed and progress can be made explaining that particular definition. But if the two parties don't agree to a definition up front, then it is likely to result in a trainwreck.

Re: What’s so hard about understanding consciousness?

#299

Post by eatsyourtacos »

foobarian wrote: post #233
webmaven wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

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…

>That line of explanation doesn't do it for me

I don't mean to be rude, but you are flat out wrong here.. you are not accepting the "simplicity" of what is actually happening- you want to make it something complicated and metaphysical, which is why the explanation doesn't do it for you.

>me, because there is only one brain that has my FPV consciousness. Why this particular one?

Well.. why do you look the way you do? Why doesn't everyone look exactly the same? Because there are tiny bits of random evolution/changes in our biological bodies. The same is happening in the brain- no one has exactly the same functioning brain. You have your FPV consciousness because that's the one you have.

If you are looking for some other answer.. then it's just philosophical nonsense at some point. It's like saying "Why does Uranus look the way it does, while Neptune looks different?". It's just what happened.. if Uranus and Neptune switched how they looked to us from the beginning, you would never know and be asking the same question that doesn't make sense.

Re: What’s so hard about understanding consciousness?

#300

Post by davidhs »

mckeed wrote: post #270
davidhs wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, the reason we have experience at all is because that is being simulated by the brain. For me a more interesting question is how it is being simulated by the brain.

Isn't that just layering an extraneous concept on top without explaining anything? Is there a difference between experiencing something (real) and having a "simulated" experience of experiencing it?

I mean "simulated" in the same sense as how computational machines can simulate any other computational machine, as in you can define some arbitrary state and arbitrary rules and with such a machine apply those rules to the state to change it.

I say that because of that's what I best understand the neocortex doing (it does that and probably something more). If you buy in what the Numenta people are talking about, then certain neurons in your neocortex configure themselves to be able to predict their inputs better, so they start to form a model of their input. In aggregate, these neurons probably start to learn multiple sequential models of their input.

My guess it that these models in the brain interact with each other. I think some of the larger models that the brain models is us (individually), the environment we find ourselves in, our mind, how we relate to it, the 3D space that we find ourselves in, and such.

This is a simulation to explain what is going on "out there" (the physical world) so that the physical organism can successfully navigate "out there".

This simulated world, body, and such, is what is "real" to us.

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