What is it like to have a brain? Ways of looking at consciousness • Hacker News Board

Re: What is it like to have a brain? Ways of looking at consciousness

#111

Post by gjm11 » Sat, Oct 15, 2022, 2:57 AM UTC

CloudRecondite wrote: post #87

gjm11 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would be interested in your response to the following thought experiment: After years of heroic work and ingenious insights, along with a lot of technological progress, we "solve" the "easy" problem of consciousness in the following (I admit implausibly in any foreseeable future) strong sense: (Note: I'm going into quite a lot of detail because I think that when people say things like "understanding how the machine…

Your answers all suggest you think consciousness is computational. If we could simulate the complex computations of the brain there’s nothing else there. I’m of the opinion that consciousness is not computational but a fundamental property of the universe that we can’t explain with current physics. I believe this because I can’t adequately explain what I experience otherwise.

As it happens I do think consciousness is computational, but that isn't the point my thought experiment is trying to make.

Rather, I was saying: if it turned out that consciousness is computational, or more precisely implemented by something we can model computationally, and if we understood its mechanisms in enough detail to do the sort of simulation-and-explanation in my thought experiment -- then, I claim, it would be difficult to maintain that there is really a separate "hard problem" of consciousness that remains untouched no matter how thoroughly we solve the "easy problem" of explaining the physical processes by which it works. If I'm right about that, I think it weakens the arguments used to suggest that here in the real world there is a separate "hard problem" that we should be very perplexed by.

(There are actually two different scenarios in which consciousness might be non-computational, and they have different implications for the thought experiment. One is where the "mechanisms" of consciousness are non-computational. In this scenario, my thought experiment could never come true: the world isn't put together in the right way for it to work, because that computer simulation will never produce the same behaviour as actual conscious humans exhibit. The other is where the mechanisms are all computable, and everything in the thought experiment goes through perfectly OK, but there's some further Essence Of Consciousness that we have and our simulations don't, without which we get all the same behaviours, right up to writing books about the nature of phenomenal consciousness or poems about the actual phenomena, but "no one's home" -- there are no real experiences, only behaviours that falsely report experiences. I think the second position is held by many people who worry about "the hard problem", and I don't think it really makes sense, but again that isn't quite the point I was trying to make, though it is closely related.)

Re: What is it like to have a brain? Ways of looking at consciousness

#112

Post by gjm11 » Sat, Oct 15, 2022, 3:04 AM UTC

mistermann wrote: post #86

gjm11 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would be interested in your response to the following thought experiment: After years of heroic work and ingenious insights, along with a lot of technological progress, we "solve" the "easy" problem of consciousness in the following (I admit implausibly in any foreseeable future) strong sense: (Note: I'm going into quite a lot of detail because I think that when people say things like "understanding how the machine…

I will take a shot: > Question 1: Do you agree that something along these lines is possible in principle? Seems reasonable. > Question 2: If it happened, would you think there is still a "hard problem" left unsolved? Yes. > Question 3: If you think there would still be a "hard problem" left unsolved, is that because you think someone in this scenario could imagine all the machinery revealed by the simulator operating…

I don't understand the relevance of your paragraph beginning "If I see an amazing demo" to the question at hand. I assume it's meant to be an analogy that justifies your answer to Q2, or something of the kind, but I don't quite understand what's being analogized to what; could you give some more details?

For the avoidance of doubt, the intention of the thought experiment is that it does indeed make accurate and precise predictions, so that if you give the real person and the simulated person the same experiences, they respond in the same way.

Of course in practice, even with all the technological advances that would be required to make the thought experiment a reality, you'd never be able to make the experiences, or the starting states, exactly identical. So in cases where how you act is exquisitely sensitive to the details of your starting state or the experiences you have, simulation and reality might diverge. My guess is that many things aren't so delicate, and I personally would be pretty impressed by a me-simulation that consistently said and did things that are the sort of things I would be likely to say and do.

Re: What is it like to have a brain? Ways of looking at consciousness

#113

Post by mtlmtlmtlmtl » Sat, Oct 15, 2022, 3:06 AM UTC

aeneasmackenzie wrote: post #109

mtlmtlmtlmtl wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah yeah, semantics. Snore. How about an objective argument that isn't dependent on assuming its own conclusions and sneaky, poorly defined and impossible thought experiments? It's like arguing with a religious person about the existence of god.

Where are you getting this? It’s not an argument, doesn’t have any conclusions and doesn’t require any though experiments. It is not semantics. Most attempts to dodge it are semantics though.

I made a point about the lack of philosophical consensus on this issue. And yes, the hard problem and also qualia depend on thought experiments like Mary's Room. When I dig past all the baroque philosophising all I find is philosophers not thinking objectively and instead being too misguided by their own experience.

Stop pretending the hard problem being a problem is some cut and dry thing. It simply is not.

And I'll generally side with the philosopher who understands more about how actual brains work, which is clearly Dennett.

Mary's room, The Chinese Room and friends seem designed around fundamental misunderstandings of how the brain, psychology and computation actually work.

They're designed to evoke a sort of visceral reaction. "Of course Mary won't understand what it's like to see red". But once you dig into the details of it, the logic breaks down.

Re: What is it like to have a brain? Ways of looking at consciousness

#114

Post by JohnBooty » Sat, Oct 15, 2022, 3:08 AM UTC

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #32

layer8 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People fundamentally disagree about whether there is anything besides the “of”. My personal introspection tells mere there is only “of”, because what I perceive as my consciousness, is, by virtue of being a perception, in the end just an “of” itself. There is some sort of recursivity involved in the whole construct of consciousness, which makes it hard to get a grasp on. In some sense, consciousness is just that, bei…

The argument you're making is just eliding the "hard problem". We can trivially imagine an electronic circuit that registers different current levels when exposed to red or blue light. Nobody (that I'm aware of) suggests that there is an experience within the electronic circuit, despite the fact that it "senses" different frequencies in the electromagnetic spectrum. The circuit is qualia-free. You, on the other hand,…

I'm a neophyte on the topic, at least as far as reading "serious" literature on it, but:

     We can trivially imagine an electronic circuit 
     that registers different current levels when 
     exposed to red or blue light. Nobody (that I'm 
     aware of) suggests that there is an experience 
     within the electronic circuit

...yeah, I'd like to here this addressed by those who claim consciousness is a non-hard problem.

If we are to claim that consciousness is a series of inputs and outputs, then even a simple device like the one you described is "conscious."

A moderately more complex device (say, a Roomba) might even be said to experience "qualia" because it clearly makes decisions and considers some things good and other things bad.

And by this logic a blade of grass is almost certainly conscious.

That's fine, I guess, but it feels awfully lazy. If we expand the definition of consciousness to include Roombas and blades of grass, that's cool, but we still have the challenging problem of defining what makes human consciousness different from grass consciousness. If we decide that the difference is purely quantitative, then we have some uncomfortable things to think about.

If we value human life more than grass or Roombas, because we have "more" consciousness, then are some humans more valuable than others because they have more neurons, or perhaps simply more active neurons?

Re: What is it like to have a brain? Ways of looking at consciousness

#115

Post by lioeters » Sat, Oct 15, 2022, 3:14 AM UTC

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #70

robotresearcher wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're demanding a the hard problem be addressed from a point of view that doesn't see the hard problem as a thing. You might as well demand the atheist explanation for how god created the world. The atheist must deny the premise of the question, they can't give an answer in the terms of the question. "We have no explanation for how there can be experiences/qualia" We do, but not in the terms you set out. The explana…

Not unexpectedly, I do not agree with this characterization. Short of panpsychism (which could be a thing), I think we mostly all agree that there are almost certainly objects in the world in which there is no experience By contrast, I think we mostly all agree that we (each of us as individuals, and humans as a group) are things in which experience does occur. This naturally gives rise to the question: if some set o…

Depending on the definition of "mind", panpsychism sounds rather reasonable: "the view that the mind or a mindlike aspect is a fundamental and ubiquitous feature of reality".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panpsychism

It could be that a rock, an ant, a computer, and a human being are all experiencing its existence at varying levels of awareness. And that this "experience" isn't necessarily exclusive to living things - though it may be impossible to prove or understand how a computer experiences itself, if at all.

It's also amusing to entertain the opposite, the perspective of people who deny the existence of "experience and qualia" altogether, who argue there is no "hard problem of consciousness" in the first place. Maybe people experience consciousness so differently, for some it's "invisible", and for others it's undeniable and obvious that it exists.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualia

Re: What is it like to have a brain? Ways of looking at consciousness

#116

Post by JohnBooty » Sat, Oct 15, 2022, 3:17 AM UTC

layer8 wrote: post #96

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "just sensing of ..." We know that physical systems can sense phenomena in the world. We doubt that they experience anything when they do so. Even if we create a Hofstadterian "strange loop" so that we sense our own sensing, that does not give rise to "experience". I concede that it could be a matter of scale, but a photosensor that knows that it glows yellow when it senses red does not have an experience.

I dispute that "experience" is something that requires a special explanation. The feeling of what you call "experience" is just something that you sense inside your brain. It is just content, data, like thoughts and other perceptions are as well. You are thinking about it. You are thinking about how you feel about it. You have perceptions about your thinking of how you feel about it. Is your cognition able to process…

    It seems that you are thinking that perceptions lead 
    to experience, and then nothing else.

    My view is that perceptions lead to internal processing 
    that in turn is itself perceived by our cognition, in 
    addition to the original perceptions

By this definition, which I don't necessarily disagree with, wouldn't a single level of reflection/introspection have to qualify as consciousness?

If we decide that a simple light sensor isn't "conscious" because it's a pure input/output machine with no machinery that could reasonably be described as "internal processing", then what about a Roomba?

Re: What is it like to have a brain? Ways of looking at consciousness

#117

Post by phs318u » Sat, Oct 15, 2022, 3:24 AM UTC

Reading through the comments I get the sense that there's something missing in our attempts to link "qualia" to hardware/wetware. My brain is made of neurons but "I" am not my neurons in and of themselves. There seems to be an emergent system of collective behaviour and responses to inputs that I call me. If a madman were to perform an experiment, successively scooping out teaspons of brain matter from my skull, I would start out being "me", but at some point, I would no longer be me (or perhaps anyone at all in the sense of being a conscious human). So while the hardware/wetware is a requirement, the conscious being "me" that I feel that I am, seems to be an emergent property of the organisation and dare I say "training" (tuning?) of this hardware.

So, if "I" am defined at an emergent level above the mere hardware, then there must be way of describing/defining the model of me. Intuitively, we build models of each other, especially people we know well. What is that model beyond an expectation/predictive model of behaviour based on possible inputs?

I feel that's where the gold is.

Full disclosure: I am just a fascinated bystander to this discussion. If this comment has elicited eye-rolls from those more familiar with the state of play, my apologies.

Re: What is it like to have a brain? Ways of looking at consciousness

#118

Post by prng2021 » Sat, Oct 15, 2022, 3:30 AM UTC

maroonblazer wrote: post #108

prng2021 wrote: post #99

To me, David Chalmer is really overrated as a philosopher and so are his ideas about consciousness. Essentially everything is an example of emergence and this is no different. Yes we absolutely do need to have words like "chair" as a level of abstraction. Yes we do need the word "consciousness" to talk about this quality/ability humans have which is so hard to describe but encompasses self awareness and experience (b…

> There's no magic behind it, just mystery because we don't understand it. How is this different from, or inconsistent with, Chalmers' ideas about consciousness?

He believes that consciousness cannot be reduced to atomic level phenomena. That kind of discussion is only about his so-called easy problem. To him, there is something beyond that. I refer to that "something" as magic because I believe there isn't anything beyond matter/energy to describe all examples of emergence, including consciousness.

Going to my original comment's example of removing atoms from a brain, the number of atoms, which atoms, and interactions between the atoms is the mystery.

Re: What is it like to have a brain? Ways of looking at consciousness

#119

Post by qudat » Sat, Oct 15, 2022, 3:40 AM UTC

phs318u wrote: post #117

Reading through the comments I get the sense that there's something missing in our attempts to link "qualia" to hardware/wetware. My brain is made of neurons but "I" am not my neurons in and of themselves. There seems to be an emergent system of collective behaviour and responses to inputs that I call me. If a madman were to perform an experiment, successively scooping out teaspons of brain matter from my skull, I wo…

I think you might enjoy Searle: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0XTDLq34M18

Re: What is it like to have a brain? Ways of looking at consciousness

#120

Post by oldstrangers » Sat, Oct 15, 2022, 3:53 AM UTC

53r3PB9769ba wrote: post #29

oldstrangers wrote: post #3

Just blindly bought this book because I think consciousness is one of the most fascinating unexplained aspects of our universe.

Maybe I'm a p-zombie then, because I just don't get it. I've spent hours upon hours thinking about thinking and observing my own thought processes and I don't see anything that couldn't be explained scientifically.

Why am I me and not you? Why am I not everyone? Am I everyone? Is consciousness an illusion? Is consciousness specific to an individual or do we all start with a 'base consciousness' that evolves with age? What is the chemical, physical or biological process responsible for consciousness? Does consciousness exist on an atomic level? Why do electrons appear to be conscious? Why can't we quantify it? Can we transfer it? Do trees or fungi have consciousness? Why or why not? What's the minimal requirement for consciousness? Is constitutive panpsychism real? Is consciousness a latent property of the universe?

Etc.