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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?

#321

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

BobbyJo wrote: post #314
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 2) We know it is composed, in some way and to some degree, of information.

I don't see how we can be said to know this, certainly not at this point in human investigation of consciousness.

Re: What’s so hard about understanding consciousness?

#322

Post by jqgatsby »

rland wrote: post #259
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, but in the opposite direction -- and then back again -- from hypoglycemia (low blood sugar). Over a much longer time period (several hours). Craziest thing I have ever experienced. Basically, when you have hypoglycemia, you lose "fine" things first, and you sort of lose things in order, from "fine" (picking things up, balancing, seeing small details) towards "coarse" (talking, walking) and then of…

Emotion seems to be a form of super-intelligence or pre-intelligence. Every time I worry about the rate at which we are supposedly approaching "artificial intelligence", I ask myself how close we are to being able to synthesize artificial emotion. Seems like a comfortable 1000 years, if not much much more.

Re: What’s so hard about understanding consciousness?

#323

Post by faeyanpiraat »

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 once crashed while snowboarding and lost consciousness.

When I woke up when the ski patrol started talking to me I did not have a profound experience like you, it was simply like waking up a little tired, but I was “there” instantaneously.

Did not remember the falling though, so it must have been quick.

I guess the mechanics of “turning off” matter.

A different scary thought: how can you verify you are still “you” when you go to sleep and wake up tomorrow?

Edit: I also remember when I had surgery and they injected the sleeping drug, I felt my body disappearing as the drug circulated in my bloodstream, and I lost consciousness instantly as it reached my head. It was a weird experience.

Re: What’s so hard about understanding consciousness?

#324

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

GeorgeKangas wrote: post #307
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I believe Dennett is an eliminative materialist, so he would consider qualia to be an illusion. That's correct, mostly, but it also means this position is nonsensical. What is notable about qualia is that it is possible to have them at all. An illusion is definitionally a qualia. You cannot have an illusion without qualia existing. Dennett tries to finesse this, but in my opinion fails. I think he wants it to be po…

Dennett's position makes perfect sense -- if Dennett is a zombie. For a zombie, to whom subjective experience (SE) is not even a thing, the "hard problem" can only mean: why do people talk about SE? So that's what they set about explaining. However, I don't think Dennett (or any human) is actually a zombie. The difficulty, is getting people to recognize their own SE. Our vocabulary, all about material and mechanisms,…

I think it is preposterous to suggest that Dennett is not recognizing his own SE.

Dennett, however, requires that the mysterious part of his own SE must be explainable by a non-mysterious aspect of SE. He just doesn't have any proposal for what or how that could be. He wants to wave his hands and say, "well, we have detectors for this and that and these predictive capabilities and these modelling systems, and so ... ta-da, we're conscious!"

Re: What’s so hard about understanding consciousness?

#325

Post by mensetmanusman »

krapp wrote: post #308
mensetmanusman wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“ 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.

Again, your definitions of "natural" and "supernatural" are not ones that anyone else uses. Natural laws are observed within nature, which makes them a part of nature. To claim that natural laws are supernatural simply because they're abstractions, and that consciousness is therefore supernatural regardless of its nature, is absurd. It's a rhetorical cheat, not an argument.

That’s fair, although I’m not sure we can observe consciousness, we can only experience it, we have no measure…

Re: What’s so hard about understanding consciousness?

#326

Post by dibujante »

tasty_freeze wrote: post #290
dibujante wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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").

I think it is the question, because if there is an AI that can experience qualia, and my toy AI doesn't, then there's some inflection point between the two that can experience qualia. You can set up goalposts just slightly past any toy example but you're just inventing Zeno's Qualia.

Re: What’s so hard about understanding consciousness?

#327

Post by plutonorm »

cscurmudgeon wrote: post #312
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.

I think it's a good test of how conscious a person is. The way we are taught to understand the world - through the scientific process - leads to the conclusion that consciousness is either an illusion or emergent.

It is only through direct inspection of one's own internal experience that it becomes apparent consciousness is not an illusion. Therefore those who claim consciousness is an illusion are not in fact conscious.

Those who say it is emergent are perhaps conscious but have not looked carefully enough to understand that consciousness is an entirely different category of thing to physical reality.

The problem here is that science as a system of thought operates in a kind of space separate from the space of conscious experience. The intelligence born of that scientific process which is a kind of entity that exists in it's own right - is not itself conscious and hence cannot introspect correctly about consciousness.

So when a person is operating in the mode of scientific thinking they are in a sense embodying that disembodied intelligence that is not aware. Or at least it is not able to introspect about it's own awareness. And so they draw incorrect and non-sensical conclusions that fly in the face of everyone's direct visceral experience.

It really is quite a phenomena.

Re: What’s so hard about understanding consciousness?

#328

Post by dekhn »

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.

Nope. I've also experienced this (just sort of fell to the floor unconscious and then woke up 10 seconds later). It was like my brain was slowly paging in bits of memory that had been stored out to tape. Like, who I am. Where I am. Why I am there?. When I wake up from most dreams, I have a bit of trouble remembering what's true and what's dream, but I know where I am, who I am, and why I'm there.

Re: What’s so hard about understanding consciousness?

#329

Post by 50 »

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…

Had this thought recently: The function of psychedelics is not to induce hallucinations, but to help you recognize that you’re always already hallucinating.

Re: What’s so hard about understanding consciousness?

#330

Post by visarga »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #305
visarga wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's try to replace "who" with "computer". Who is the computer that observes itself? all of them. A computer is not passive, a brain is not passive. It can observe itself. In other words, the parts communicate.

A city is not passive. The parts communicate. Is there consciousness there?

Maybe it is. It's a self replicator, a culture and technology preserver, a competitor in the race for resources.

I think much of what we think is human intelligence is actually crystalized intelligence in the form of language and tools. We got them by default, as citizens of our city.

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