Decades-long bet on consciousness ends

> We can assign a word to this experience, but we can't define it objectively such that a non-conscious being would understand it. That doesn't mean it's useless to talk about this real experience we have.

That's undeniably true and I feel somewhat sorry having used the term "useless" in my comment, then again I don't.

The best teacher I had in school days was a philosophy Ph.d. who pivoted to middle and high school teaching for a while (then quit it after a couple of years). His favorite subjects included Thomas Aquin and Plato.

When I say "precise definitions", I don't claim to understand the argument wholesale, nor did I want to dismiss talking about "subjective" experience. I have deep respect for philosophy as the non-specialized root of all science, as I said. This includes thinking about what my scare-quoted qualifier "subjective" means.

My comment was meant to be a half-assed critique justifying why I didn't RTFA, after having it half-read.

Importantly (even if half-assed), a critique of the article, not its subject matter.

It just felt like a logical omission and therefore an impleasant reading flow for a pop sci article.

If there had been an introductory sentence to that paragraph to qualify the definition, I wouldn't have commented.

That is one position, but here's the thing though - how does something like "F = ma" enter into your mind in the first place? It first has to enter your consciousness right? And then maybe you might need to make a focused effort of grappling with it to understand what the symbols and implications of that equation mean before you sort of internalize it?

Maybe one line of inquiry that might be able to give us some clues is if we're able to actually have people learn something like a physics equation with no prior knowledge of it while they aren't conscious of the learning of it. That might be a hard study to do with possible ethical concerns but if there's a way to design it, I could see some hope for getting closer to understanding the role/structure of consciousness.

One maybe plausible explanation might be that there's some sort of hierarchy of pattern matching there, where first you need to understand language, then mathematical language, then finally the physics equations. If you take that view, then the equations are really just extremely sophisticated pattern matching constructs. They don't have to actually _be_ the code that makes the universe-computer run so to speak, they just need to give us a precise enough predictive model that we're able to do useful things with it.

Maybe another way to put it is, we're not actually uncovering the source code of the universe, we're just looking at the functioning of the universe and extrapolating our own patterns that yield the greatest predictive power. On that view at least there are some plausble avenues for explaining strange artifacts like the time-reversibility of some equations - i.e. our patterns show that this will give predictions even if time flowed backwards, but the universe's time doesn't flow backwards because this pattern that we found is not the same thing as the actual universe. In that sense we'll never be able to actually uncover this source code so to speak, but that is just how science works - we're always looking for a more accurate theory - we'll never reach "the final theory", and even if we did, how would we know?

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I strongly disagree with this view, not so much the emergent part, but rather that "any sufficiently powerful cognitive system" can gain consciousness. To me, it suggests that consciousness is magic, because it doesn't matter how information is organized and stored, it doesn't matter how information is processed, consciousness will be able to emerge miraculously from even the most disorganized chaotic mess of information processing. This view has come up a lot recently, because it's the only explanation that allows for AI to be sentient, AI models which are just software running on computers.

However, the brain is highly organized, wherein the various types of sensory input are fed into specific regions of the brain which specialize in processing that type of input. Many areas of the brain have topographical structures which are reminiscent of the type of sensory input they process. This is evident in Retinotopy for visual inputs and Tonotopy for auditory inputs. You will not find such topographical structures in a computer.

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

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

You have to ask the questions, why do we have meaningful conscious experience that is sensible, coherent, and well formed? And why is consciousness not random chaotic nonsense? Because the brain has had hundreds of millions of years to evolve to process sensory input such that it yields a sensible conscious experience. This simply isn't true of any technology today.

On the other hand, experiment with psychedelic drugs and see how crazy your conscious experience can be. The fact that our day to day experiences aren't like that is significant and evident that the brain evolved to process sensory input for conscious experience.

so gpt in the realm of text is in right? only sense it was given (excluding multi modal)