What’s so hard about understanding consciousness? • Hacker News Board

Re: What’s so hard about understanding consciousness?

#341

Post by kranner » Sat, Feb 05, 2022, 12:17 AM UTC

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…

> Things feel good or they feel bad at a level far below anything resembling what they are.

This primal good-or-bad feeling is known as Vedana in classical Buddhism. On an at-home meditation retreat two months ago I had begun to see this arise in every interaction with almost everything. So much so that someone set off a firecracker outside my house (pretty normal in my neighbourhood but at an unexpected time) and I first noted that something unpleasant had happened, then noted that my eyes had flinched, then heard the sound, then recognised the sound as a firecracker. (I was in the shower at the time, wide awake.) The first glimmer of almost every experience was this vedana.

Re: What’s so hard about understanding consciousness?

#342

Post by foobarian » Sat, Feb 05, 2022, 12:24 AM UTC

eatsyourtacos wrote: post #299

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…

>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?…

Likewise no offense but I don't think you are getting my point. That's fine.

Look, the bottom line is we need to understand how the phenomenon works so we can replicate it and harness it. My thinking may or may not be wrong, but what's certain is that it's not testable. Can't wait for an explanation that is :-)

Re: What’s so hard about understanding consciousness?

#343

Post by rixed » Sat, Feb 05, 2022, 12:24 AM UTC

GeorgeKangas wrote: post #226

naasking wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> To me, the fact that illusion and hallucination are being invoked is strong evidence of handwaving being engaged in to dismiss an otherwise difficult problem. Dennett doesn't dismiss the difficulty of the problem, he just dismisses that the difficulty is where people think it is. For instance, he would fully agree that the brain is insanely complex and just elaborating how information processing works will be very,…

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.

Nice try, but there cannot be any test for zombie.

Of course the zombie would pretend they experience SE and some will even loudly disagree with the referenced article.

Re: What’s so hard about understanding consciousness?

#344

Post by CuriouslyC » Sat, Feb 05, 2022, 12:30 AM UTC

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #282

abletonlive wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The minerals in rocks can change in response to their environment. There has to be something that it feels like for that change to happen.

Re: What’s so hard about understanding consciousness?

#345

Post by jstanley » Sat, Feb 05, 2022, 12:33 AM UTC

calebm wrote: post #146

hibernator149 wrote: post #20

My pet theory is that people who think that consciousness is not a hard problem are P-Zombies that can't experience the problem. On a more serious note, as a materialist, I have a really hard time accepting that my self/experience can't be explained materialistically. It's like I have this nice theory of everything, but it fails when I try to apply it to myself. Reminds me of Gödel's incompleteness theorem.

A program running in a computer would have a difficult time distinguishing itself from the computer hardware on which it runs. And it would have no direct perception of the programmer.

A program running in a computer doesn't perceive anything at all. Why we do is the hard problem.

Re: What’s so hard about understanding consciousness?

#346

Post by naasking » Sat, Feb 05, 2022, 12:33 AM UTC

pcwalton wrote: post #274

naasking wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I always found illusionism completely nonsensical, for the reasons that Galen Strawson put forth in "Realistic Monism" [1] (emphasis mine): > Some of them — Dennett is a prime example — are so in thrall to the fundamental intuition of dualism, the intuition that the experiential and the physical are utterly and irreconcilably different, that they are prepared to deny the existence of experience, more or less (c)overt…

By contrast, Strawson is so enthralled with the primacy of experience that he can easily dismiss the demonstrable facts that literally everything his experience is telling him is a fiction (the world is not classical, there is no continuity of self, that our perceptions reflect evolutionary fitness and not truth, etc., etc.), and yet still maintain that experience itself must somehow be an exception. Pretty absurd indeed.

Re: What’s so hard about understanding consciousness?

#347

Post by naasking » Sat, Feb 05, 2022, 12:36 AM UTC

dan_mctree wrote: post #311

naasking wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 experienc…

> Because subjective awareness is not a perception, they're two entirely different kinds of of concepts.

Not under eliminative materialism.

> You could convince me both the needle and the pain are illusionary, but not that my experience is.

The ineffability of the experience of the pain is the qualia that needs explanation, the rest are all compatible with mechanistic explanations. It is the ineffable quality that disappears under any serious scrutiny.

Edit: if you want to understand how eliminativism can work scientifically, I suggested reading this paper:

The attention schema theory: a mechanistic account of subjective awareness, http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00...

An analogy for tech nerds would be how the illusion of multitasking on a single CPU machine arises from imperceptibly fast context switching. Something similar happens in that theory, where our perceptual faculties are constantly switching between perceptual signals from our internal representation of the world, and the perceptual signals from our senses.

Re: What’s so hard about understanding consciousness?

#348

Post by naasking » Sat, Feb 05, 2022, 12:40 AM UTC

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #269

naasking wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> 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…

> 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.

I think that's incorrect, as it relies on a definition of "illusion" that begs the question on the existence of a subject, just like Descartes. Define illusion as "a perception that directly entails a false conclusion", and there is no subject needed.

> I think he wants it to be possible that you can somehow experience things in a non-mysterious way, and this this non-mysterious experience explains the mysterious experience stuff. I think he's wrong.

No, what he's saying is that there is no "you" to experience anything, there are only scattered but correlated thoughts that are stitched together in a way that produces a false conclusion that there is a "you".

Re: What’s so hard about understanding consciousness?

#349

Post by guerrilla » Sat, Feb 05, 2022, 12:44 AM UTC

pessimizer wrote: post #134

guerrilla wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Umm, no. Having a theory of identity allows you to deduce the answers to your questions.

Based on an arbitrary choice. I can deduce as many answers to my questions as theories of identity that I can count. None of them will give me any insight into the question of subjectivity.

If it's an arabitrary choice then the problem is entirely you.

Re: What’s so hard about understanding consciousness?

#350

Post by naasking » Sat, Feb 05, 2022, 12:46 AM UTC

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #324

GeorgeKangas wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ...…

> 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!"

I don't think this gives Dennett enough credit, because what our instruments are all telling us is that there no single, indivisible "self" at all; we are all made up of constituent parts either none of which have consciousness themselves (eliminativism), or all of which must have consciousness (pansychism), because ineffable qualia cannot simply appear from nothing. This reddit post does a great job breaking down Dennett's position sensibly:

https://reddit.com/r/askphilosophy/comments/shneug/can_someo...