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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?

#311

Post by dan_mctree »

naasking wrote: post #242
GeorgeKangas wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If one is a "phenomenological zombie", i.e. does not have subjective experience (SE), then Dennett's position is the only one that makes any sense. The only thing to explain, is why others are believing this SE illusion. Those of us who do have SE, and have recognized it, know something the zombies cannot know: that SE must exist.

No, you have a perception that you think entails subjective experience. Surely you would acknowledge the many ways you or others could fool your other perceptions, but it's frankly confusing that you think this simply cannot happen to your perception of subjective awareness. The fact is, if this illusion was adaptive in evolutionary terms, which it arguably is, then you would have developed such an illusory perceptio…

>but it's frankly confusing that you think this simply cannot happen to your perception of subjective awareness

Because subjective awareness is not a perception, they're two entirely different kinds of of concepts. Equating the two would seems stranger to me than equating say the feeling of pain with the concept of a needle. You could convince me both the needle and the pain are illusionary, but not that my experience is. That you seem to be genuinely convinced that subjective experience and our flawed sensory apparatuses are even in the same ballpark implies to me that you probably either do not have that experience, or that unlike in my case, your experience is somehow not connected to the output that typing fingers can produce

Re: What’s so hard about understanding consciousness?

#312

Post by cscurmudgeon »

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…

Well said. There is another harder problem of consciousness: A lot of people miss the point of the hard problem of consciousness.

Re: What’s so hard about understanding consciousness?

#313

Post by serpix »

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…

if you did not have full conscious awareness when regaining first sensations, then what was it that remembers this experience? I'm saying that there was full consciousness already present as you remember everything.

Re: What’s so hard about understanding consciousness?

#314

Post by BobbyJo »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #304
BobbyJo wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But it is not the same question This is debatable. If you subscribe to the idea that consciousness is an emergent phenomenon, then it makes sense as an avenue to the answer.

If your answer to "how can anything be conscious" is "it just can, if the system meets these requirements", then obviously, that's the only answer and you may as well move on to "what are we conscious of?" At this point, I'm not willing to regard consciousness as something like gravity or the weak force, though I concede that it could turn out that way.

My personal train of thought is this: 1) We know consciousness exists (as far as evidence goes it has more than anything else since it is the conduit to everything else) and 2) We know it is composed, in some way and to some degree, of information.

Information might be a small piece, and it might be the thing itself, but it's the only tangible avenue we have to pursue, so I don't think it's a matter of them answering or discussing a different question, I think it's them framing the same question with slightly different assumptions.

Re: What’s so hard about understanding consciousness?

#315

Post by BoiledCabbage »

p_noumenon wrote: post #303
alar44 wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

...sounds exactly like waking up from a dream.

I think the more interesting point seems to be that the way you appear to wake from dreams is very different from 99.9% of people. For most people, waking from a dream is absolutely nothing like that.

Re: What’s so hard about understanding consciousness?

#316

Post by GeorgeKangas »

naasking wrote: post #242
GeorgeKangas wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If one is a "phenomenological zombie", i.e. does not have subjective experience (SE), then Dennett's position is the only one that makes any sense. The only thing to explain, is why others are believing this SE illusion. Those of us who do have SE, and have recognized it, know something the zombies cannot know: that SE must exist.

No, you have a perception that you think entails subjective experience. Surely you would acknowledge the many ways you or others could fool your other perceptions, but it's frankly confusing that you think this simply cannot happen to your perception of subjective awareness. The fact is, if this illusion was adaptive in evolutionary terms, which it arguably is, then you would have developed such an illusory perceptio…

Recognizing one's subjective experience (SE), entails knowing for certain that it exists.

That true statement is definitely not an argument in favor SE; it would be of no evidentiary value to a zombie, for example.

If and when you, naasking, have SE and recognize it: it's existence will then be impossible to doubt.

Re: What’s so hard about understanding consciousness?

#317

Post by lostmsu »

chasd00 wrote: post #257
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…

It's pretty straightforward to follow when consciousness ends, with death. In my mind, a harder question is when does it begin? After one cell, two cells, a trillion cells? If a scientist can pin down the moment it starts then that may lead to more progress on the other questions.

That is not really a big problem if you take consciousness as some sort of a continuous measure. For simplicity I usually use skill at playing any chosen real-time game.

Re: What’s so hard about understanding consciousness?

#318

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

abletonlive wrote: post #309
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How can you be so sure there is no experience of being a rock? Surely it's wildly different from being a finger or a person, and perhaps, very boring from a human's perspective. I'm not sure why everybody insists you can have qualia or you can't, as if it's a binary thing. Perhaps it's a gradient. I would say there is something like being a plant, or something like being a computer program. Just because we are unable…

Well, I'm not totally convinced it's not like anything to be a rock. But this is the generally widely-used object of "an object without qualia".

You are apparently a believer in some degree of panpyschism. That's fine. Conscious is like gravity - it's just a part of the universe and there's no explanation for it other than that it is experienced by anything with (mass, for gravity ; ??? for consciousness).

I'm not opposed to this explanation, I'm just not (yet) convinced that it's the right one.

Re: What’s so hard about understanding consciousness?

#319

Post by visarga »

agent008t wrote: post #272
visarga wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But 'you' are not any of these. Ha ha, without eyes, ears, tactile, and the rest of senses what would be left? Brain a in vat, is THAT the real you? The self is an actor in a game, you are your game, not the "observer", a weird concept if I may say so. As if it is not related to the game it observes. Its very existence is on the line, though, one missed observation and it could be dead. You are the actor, not the o…

Just try a simple experiment. It will only take 10 minutes. Set an alarm on your phone for 10 minutes. Sit down in a quiet room. Close your eyes. Your goal is to observe the physical sensations produced by natural breathing in your nose for the 10 minutes. Give it your full attention and not miss a single breath, and really feel how each breath in and out feels at the tip of your nose as the air passes it. Easy, righ…

Yes, thoughts pop up on their own. The brain is a team made of a generator and a critic. They learn and work together. The generator is like a language model, it will make some contextual association or random jump. But then the critic allows to evaluate this fresh thought. Doing this multiple rounds before acting is necessary for reasoning.

When you meditate you let your generator run free and unrestricted or try to quiet it, while the critic should stop from interfering. By lacking its interference you just sit without an explicit goal. You're not achieving anything, you have no purpose. Just being.

That is nice to do sometimes, I think it's a very artistic perception, but insufficient for the requirements of life. In life you need to engage the critic, you need to construct your solutions. The meditation experience is like some kinds of music, sports and art, a nice thing to cultivate, but not the pinnacle of consciousness.

Consciousness has a really important job to do, it fights for its own existence, it creates consciousness. Nobody else is going to help it if it doesn't help itself.

Re: What’s so hard about understanding consciousness?

#320

Post by [deleted] »

ncmncm wrote: post #177
carapace wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't say anything about "superior". Is being a "P-Zombie" inferior to being self-aware? By what metric could such a comparison be made? Is the water inferior to the wave? Also, "tying themselves in knots" != "noticed themselves", if anything it's the opposite: all knots untie.

All knots can be untied, if that is what you choose to do. But not everybody chooses that. Thus far you have not chosen that. "Noticing yourself" is something literally everyone does. Not everyone ties themselves in knots. The alternative to tying yourself in knots is to think clearly without inventing falsehoods. "P-zombies" is just another word for solipsism. The moment somebody proposes either, you know there will…

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