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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?

#331

Post by garethm »

bitexploder wrote: post #204
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 slept once on the mats. I literally remember feeling like I was in a fuzzy and comfortable dream and waking up to my partner shaking me and asking if I am alright. I blurted out something like "What are we doing?" and I was wondering why my partner was sitting next to me and where I was and what was going on. But not in a panicked or concerned way. Like some parts of my brain knew what was happening. But the thinki…

I don't tend to have a headache afterwards, but your description matches up to my experience of coming around after fainting. I tend to feel fuzzy and dreamlike and it takes a few seconds to work out what's going on.

Re: What’s so hard about understanding consciousness?

#332

Post by cpeterso »

browningstreet wrote: post #302
bitexploder wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I slept once on the mats. I literally remember feeling like I was in a fuzzy and comfortable dream and waking up to my partner shaking me and asking if I am alright. I blurted out something like "What are we doing?" and I was wondering why my partner was sitting next to me and where I was and what was going on. But not in a panicked or concerned way. Like some parts of my brain knew what was happening. But the thinki…

I once woke up in the high school bathroom, laying on the floor. I was alone. I have no idea how I got there, what happened before, and how long the thing had happened. It seemed unlikely that you could be in a high school bathroom THAT LONG without someone else showing up. It's not happened since. A one-time event. The confusion I woke up with so profound and complete and slow... I think about it often. I think abou…

You may have had a seizure.

Re: What’s so hard about understanding consciousness?

#333

Post by neosat »

visarga wrote: post #231
GonzaloRizzo wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

who is the observer who is observing myself?

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.

The whole point is, that's not an obviously valid replacement in the context of consciousness. What's your definition of "passive"?

Re: What’s so hard about understanding consciousness?

#334

Post by 2snakes »

Whew! I read the article and this entire thread. I'm not surprised that most people are materialists. But I think if you really look into the literature with OOBEs and parapsychology you will find that there are some amazing experiences that are not explained by metaphysical materialism. And you can experience this yourself with deep meditation and/or the blessings of teachers. I think the scientific method is valid for exploring these states too. True Yoga is a science of mind control. I would advise looking into Patangali's Eight-fold Path with the goal of kaivalya/Asamprajnata Samadhi/Cosmic Consciousness and the concept of prapatti (surrender to grace of the higher self and others). Let's not throw out the baby with the bathwater when it comes to Scientific paradigms! An interesting perspective is also found in the RBC from brainvoyage.com and a fascinating refutation of materialism is found on p.6 here: http://www.pni.org/groundbreaking/TDVPunification.pdf

Re: What’s so hard about understanding consciousness?

#335

Post by vmception »

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 with enough co-processors responding to enough "(dis)incentives" you could get the same result.

Present and future anger, present and future pain, predicting whether future social cohesion will be maintained based on how a response is made to someone within a social graph. Understanding and assuming that nodes (other people) within a social graph can communicate to each other to update the state of a social interaction that they weren't present for.

I think it is possible.

If pleasure was just a variable on a scale from 0 to 10, and not its own co-processor, and an assumption that some forms of pleasure can influence parts of the social graph, it maybe isn't even that complicated anymore.

I think it would become less distinguishable from consciousness.

Re: What’s so hard about understanding consciousness?

#337

Post by rixed »

krapp wrote: post #26
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…

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 problem with your "non metaphysical definition of consciousness", is that it does not define what consciousness is. It actually pretends it does not exist.

Sure enough, we know consciousness is tied mainly to the body (and the brain in particular, but not only). It starts and ends with it, it changes with every small change of it. They are just one "thing", two sides of the same coin, it seems.

The problem is, and it's very not a trivial one, that we can know the physical world and our body that is part of it, but for all we know about that physical world, consciousness is not required. It's like it's added on top for no good reason. We can feel the world and make sense of it, up to a point where we have a good understanding of how the whole observable universe kind of works, but we couldn't do better, if we had to describe consciousness to a distant relative from another universe, than to say "so around here we have matter and space and time, and they act like this and that, according to those equations, and when this kind of particule enter the vincinity of that one then this happens, etc, oh and by the way, every time you have a piece of matter organized in such a way that it can somehow represents itself and its environment, then this thing feels that it exists independently, and I'm afraid I can't explain what feeling feels like, you have to be conscious to understand, sorry".

You could say that we know how physics works but not why, and similarly we know how consciousness works but not why. But that would be inaccurate, because what we know about the "how" of consciousness is actually the "how" of behavior. We know nothing about the "how" of conscious experience; for instance we know how pain works at the level of individual neurons and how it leads to some macroscopic behavior, but we have no clue how this relates to (not using "cause" because it's certainly not causal) an experience of pain, and what the subject of that experience is, or if there is only one or many such subjects, or how independent these subjects are from each others, etc...

Re: What’s so hard about understanding consciousness?

#338

Post by kovek »

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…

This reminds me of standing up too fast

Re: What’s so hard about understanding consciousness?

#339

Post by rixed »

eatsyourtacos wrote: post #187
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…

Completely strange people downvote this comment. It is completely logical, and if you disagree with any of this- it is up to you to prove otherwise. Obviously it does make people uncomfortable talking like this.. I don't understand why, I guess they are scared of the simple truth that we are simply the most evolved animals on our planet- but still animals. There is nothing special about our brain (compared to other s…

> it is up to you to prove otherwise

This is funny because the reason why I cannot prove you that I am conscious _in_ _addition_ _to_ being a body governed by the rules of physics, is the same reason why I believe consciousness is metaphysical.

Qed :)

Re: What’s so hard about understanding consciousness?

#340

Post by jstanley »

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…

> 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.

And if so, would that simulation still create the subjective experience? Or would it act exactly the same as the real person except the subjective experience never occurs?

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