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

#121

Post by qudat » Sat, Oct 15, 2022, 4:03 AM UTC

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #15

lifefeed wrote: post #4

Aeon just had a great article on the consciousness, "Seeing and somethingness" https://aeon.co/essays/how-blindsight-answers-the-hard-probl... It argues that consciousness evolved out of sensation, where we developed an "inner self" to predict how sensations would affect us, and it's that inner self that became our conscious. Don't miss out on the comments section, the author answers a lot of question in there.

Like Dennett's book "Consciousness Explained", the Aeon article falls into the category of explaining what we are conscious of , not how it is possible to be conscious of anything at all. It does not really tackle Chalmers "hard problem of consciousness", despite the subtitle.

How is consciousness possible?

Here's my naive answer with just a bachelors in neuroscience.

There are some "business requirements" as far as I know.

We need:

- space and time

- memory

- inputs

- decision making models

- attention

You need space and time because thinking is a verb. Action is required which needs the passage of time.

You need memory in order to link past events with current ones. I'm not strictly talking about memory from earlier in the year or day, but also working memory from what you perceived a second ago. Continuity seems essential.

Inputs are require because we need a data stream to grapple onto and spark brain activity. The brain can obviously cause its own activity as well.

After that it's just a recursive ETL function via the thalamo-cortical loop [1]. The "self" doesn't necessarily need to live in this loop, but it needs access to the data stream. Inputs trigger neurons/glial that recall past events which all get fed into a bunch of decision making models that spits out new thoughts or decisions which cause us to act. The loop is happening so quickly and chaotically that coupled with randomness, short term and long term memory ... you've essentially got a system to explain creativity and "free will".

Really, consciousness is just an emergent property of a nervous system. It doesn't seem nearly as magical through this lens but that's what makes it so convincing to me.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cortico-basal_ganglia-thalamo-...

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

#122

Post by PaulDavisThe1st » Sat, Oct 15, 2022, 4:13 AM UTC

mtlmtlmtlmtl wrote: post #106

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I emailed Dennett after Consciousness Explained was published, and put the same point i make at the top of this subthread to him. "I suppose that in some real sense, you are right" was his reply.

If that's literally all he wrote, that sounds more like a polite way of saying "you're wrong, and I have better things to do than argue with you about it."

He wrote more than that. I no longer have emails from that period, so I can't quote his full reply. It was friendly, and seemed to engage with the point I was making.

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

#123

Post by prng2021 » Sat, Oct 15, 2022, 4:15 AM UTC

mtlmtlmtlmtl wrote: post #106

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I emailed Dennett after Consciousness Explained was published, and put the same point i make at the top of this subthread to him. "I suppose that in some real sense, you are right" was his reply.

If that's literally all he wrote, that sounds more like a polite way of saying "you're wrong, and I have better things to do than argue with you about it."

Yea. "I suppose in some real sense"... What does that even mean?

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

#124

Post by spoonfeeder006 » Sat, Oct 15, 2022, 4:45 AM UTC

> What is it like to have a brain?

I wouldn't even know

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

#125

Post by notfed » Sat, Oct 15, 2022, 4:51 AM UTC

opportune wrote: post #52

notfed wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What scares me is that some leading AI researchers hold this view (that consciousness in general is nothing special) and it makes them come across as unempathetic, as if all conscious beings---meat or AI---are simply computers and in turn pain is just some kind of computation and therefore that it's silly to even discuss taking precautions to prevent any kind of AI suffering.

That’s because consciousness is not well-defined and might as well be woo. The verbiage around it is the same as a “soul” Define it rigorously and show a physical basis and you might have something to work with.

All qualia (which consciousness itself closes over) are impossible to rigorously define with words. Attempts to do so will come across as woo.

What we can do however is experience qualia first-hand, and prove to ourselves that they exist. While we may never know if we're experiencing them the same way as each other, the fact that we can experience qualia at all is undeniable, and the question of why we can do so is the real question being asked here.

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

#126

Post by labrador » Sat, Oct 15, 2022, 4:51 AM UTC

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #15

lifefeed wrote: post #4

Aeon just had a great article on the consciousness, "Seeing and somethingness" https://aeon.co/essays/how-blindsight-answers-the-hard-probl... It argues that consciousness evolved out of sensation, where we developed an "inner self" to predict how sensations would affect us, and it's that inner self that became our conscious. Don't miss out on the comments section, the author answers a lot of question in there.

Like Dennett's book "Consciousness Explained", the Aeon article falls into the category of explaining what we are conscious of , not how it is possible to be conscious of anything at all. It does not really tackle Chalmers "hard problem of consciousness", despite the subtitle.

This is my eternal complaint. Like a fish not noticing water, people don't mention it because it is a given. I'm not even sure how many people are conscious of being conscious.

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

#127

Post by barrenko » Sat, Oct 15, 2022, 4:54 AM UTC

gbro3n wrote: post #24

uoaei wrote: post #7

Consciousness vs awareness vs sentience are terms that really need some society-scale effort to nail down what we mean by one or another. The conversation circles round and round because many folks talk past each other or interpret discussions in ways that the writer didn't intend. (I'm not saying the answer is available today if only we solve this dialectical issue.) Philosophers of consciousness define "consciousne…

What I rarely see / hear articulated well enough, and am not even sure that I can, are questions around why _I_ have consciousness. I understand the reasons why a body might develop meta cognition, and how it's advantageous for a being to be aware of it's thoughts. But none of this explains why my body is attached to _this_ consciousness and not another. 'Experience' is the key term I feel when the phenomenal aspect…

It's maybe the other way around - aka conciousness has you, like fish in a net. What if this conciousness and other ones are exactly the same?

But it's hard to think and reason about it really because of our own self-addiction. Kinda like kids high on ice cream can't really care what broccolli tastes like (or the other way around).

Also because consciousness doesn't really need you/us to think about it or discover it because it's kinda the only thing that's here.

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

#128

Post by TaupeRanger » Sat, Oct 15, 2022, 5:02 AM UTC

sdht0 wrote: post #33

TaupeRanger wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just as handwavy as any other explanation of consciousness. I can make an electronic device that runs a Python program that predicts how input affects the device. That doesn't make the device conscious.

A sufficiently advanced such Python program will probably actually be conscious.

Which is why it's so handwavy. Why not just say "at some point the magic comes in and you get qualia", which again, explains nothing.

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

#129

Post by jungturk » Sat, Oct 15, 2022, 5:14 AM UTC

prng2021 wrote: post #118

maroonblazer wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 nu…

I agree with your two statements:

> Essentially everything is an example of emergence and this is no different.

> There's no magic behind it, just mystery because we don't understand it.

But I still believe there's a hard problem (that is, its difficult to explain my sense of interiority using the dynamics and grammars of the substrates that surely give rise to the emergent behavior we call consciousness).

By substrate I'm referring to the base layer in emergence (i.e. emergent phenomena and their dynamics emerge from a more basic layer with its own phenomena/dynamics, which is the substrate).

As physics is the substrate for chemistry, and chemistry for biology, and biology for psychology, and psychology for society, etc... (please ignore the that I've surely leapt over or ignored various layers here and/or suggested some type of linearity rather than heirarchy).

With each emergent layer, the explanatory power of the substrate(s) wanes. Perhaps the immediate substrate is still occasionally illuminating (e.g. I can talk about valence in terms of physical properties of electron orbits, or I can talk about metabolism in terms of the chemistry of the Krebs cycle, etc...) but it becomes difficult to talk about biology (cells, tissues, organic processes, etc...) in terms of physics. I have no doubt that physics is a substrate of biology (i.e. I'm a materialist), but its not terribly useful to deploy the standard model in explaining cancer.

In the same way, I assume it to be true that physics is also a substrate of consciousness, but it isn't clear to me how our sense of interiority arises in the emergent layers. I assume its because I'm ignorant (its just a mystery), but it hasn't made the problem any less hard.

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

#130

Post by spoonfeeder006 » Sat, Oct 15, 2022, 5:33 AM UTC

qudat wrote: post #121

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like Dennett's book "Consciousness Explained", the Aeon article falls into the category of explaining what we are conscious of , not how it is possible to be conscious of anything at all. It does not really tackle Chalmers "hard problem of consciousness", despite the subtitle.

How is consciousness possible? Here's my naive answer with just a bachelors in neuroscience. There are some "business requirements" as far as I know. We need: - space and time - memory - inputs - decision making models - attention You need space and time because thinking is a verb. Action is required which needs the passage of time. You need memory in order to link past events with current ones. I'm not strictly talk…

What you are describing regarding inputs, brain activity on data stream, and how its just a recursive ETL function and such, is describing behavior and computation though

You have some input that goes into the brain, and produces neural firings that trigger actuators to respond to that stimulus

What I don't understand is why are we conscious beings instead of extremely complex bio-computation machines exhibiting memory, inputs, and complex behaviors such as attention and decision making models, all with behavioral actuators, and all this simulating thought and intelligence but really have no entity whatsoever thats actually experiencing stuff?

I've always wondered what ultimately makes neurons and all so special that they produce conciousness. Does a rock that undergoes vibrations have some sort of consciousness associated with it, if not much less than what is seen in a human?

So maybe consciousness is an inherent property of the universe that is in a plane beyond what the 5 senses can pick up on? But that in humans it finds a greater catalyst or something than in animals, plants, or minerals?

I dunno, what do you think? Is there anything rational in that train of thought or did I smoke too much crack again lol

TBH I take a lot of my inspiration of this from Baha'i Faith, which teaches that science and religion are essentially in harmony (i.e. different views on the same reality). To me a lot of the bahai teachings are really deep and elevating (i.e. making me a better person and less selfish by helping me see something more valuable than survival tendencies)

Hopefully I can live by it though