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Is consciousness part of the fabric of the universe?

scientificamerican.com

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Re: Is consciousness part of the fabric of the universe?

#101

Post by rvba »

cscurmudgeon wrote: post #90
BasedAnon wrote: post #88

What's the deal with these things being lumped in with physics? This isn't physics this is just regular philosophy with some scientific sounding language. I feel like this is people reaching for religion but not wanting to admit it to themselves.

I hate that most education systems don’t teach that physics has its roots in philosophy and some of the most rigorous recent math stems from philosophy (Gödel) leading to vacuous gatekeeping comments like this.

I thought physics has its roots in mathmatics, but those religious articles never show any equations.

Re: Is consciousness part of the fabric of the universe?

#102

Post by jemmyw »

BasedAnon wrote: post #88

What's the deal with these things being lumped in with physics? This isn't physics this is just regular philosophy with some scientific sounding language. I feel like this is people reaching for religion but not wanting to admit it to themselves.

It's a shame to see so many comments engaged in this kind of pseudoscience. There's no evidence that consciousness is anything other than a state arising from the physical processes in our bodies. I'm open minded to hypothesis that are potentially testable, but people keep just repeating the implausible.

I also hate that I keep reading that consciousness, or anything else, is a universe "hack" which is several levels of stupid. From the language level, you cannot apply that word to a non engineered system with no purpose because it implies subverting the purpose.

Re: Is consciousness part of the fabric of the universe?

#103

Post by notamy »

randallsquared wrote: post #83
MaxBarraclough wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> LLMs and AGI seem poised to give us a huge and expanding space in which to discover how consciousness works How? My own intuition is that LLMs will contribute precisely nothing to the philosophy of consciousness. Philosophers have been considering the consequences of intelligent machines for some time.

Philosophers have largely only been able to run thought experiments. While those can help clarify what we know, any apparently new knowledge generated thereby has to be confirmed by physical experiment. Physical experiments on human consciousness can only be done in very limited ways without ethical issues -- we don't have the technology to press the pause or undo buttons for human brains, and we don't have direct ac…

> Assuming we develop (apparently) conscious minds on our current trajectory, there will be opportunities to run experiments in parallel, have real controls, and AGI researchers will, hypothetically, be able to self-introspect all the way down to the most basic level.

If a hypothetical AGI is truly believed to be conscious, how could it ever possibly be ethical to experiment on such a thing?

Re: Is consciousness part of the fabric of the universe?

#104

Post by slothtrop »

tetrisgm wrote: post #79

I went to a talk by John Cleese, of Monty Python. He made a point about a recent thought that he landed through meditation. He said he believes less and less that consciousness is in the brain. Maybe it's something external, shared, and our brains work more like a camera, and make whatever is out there our own. It made an impression on me.

The most miraculous thing to me is being thrown into the world as an individual, and I think this idea of a tapped consciousness is meant to reconcile with that. There's the perspective also that it's entirely illusory like the self, but that's not satisfying by itself. Life in other things seems abstracted away, like machines running on electricity, but being me, right now, you can't help but ask things like "why am I in this body and reduced to an individual? How is it that I can experience this, and presumably, others can too?". It's crazy.

Re: Is consciousness part of the fabric of the universe?

#105

Post by sohamssd »

swader999 wrote: post #76
dbsmith83 wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you ever conducted a simple experiment to prove you were not just lucid dreaming? It is a pretty easily falsifiable claim

That's something I wonder myself. I need to do a few more, maybe up to fifty before I have enough subjective data to be certain. What is this experiment to prove I'm not lucid dreaming? You can put your fingers on your nostrils and blow through fingers in lucid dream, irl the air stops, but in OBE, you might not have a full body. One time I did, other time I was just like a shadow, half formed. Really weird. There's…

A simple experiment would be to have someone else write down a number on a piece of paper while you weren't in that room, have you do your OBE thingy and then accurately tell that number several times.

Re: Is consciousness part of the fabric of the universe?

#106

Post by mannykannot »

DFHippie wrote: post #20

"Asserting that consciousness is fundamental and ubiquitous does nothing to shed light on the way an experience of blueness is the way it is, and not some other way. Nor does it explain anything about the possible functions of consciousness, nor why consciousness is lost in states such as dreamless sleep, general anaesthesia, and coma." -- Anil Seth, from the article This bit -- "nor why consciousness is lost in stat…

> Panpsychism -- or cosmopsychism or whatever -- is the Occam's razor solution.

Occam's razor (the choice of the most parsimonious explanation) does not apply until you have candidate explanations, and at this point we don't have any. Simply supposing that consciousness is fundamental in some way is no more of an explanation than, say, simply supposing it to be an emergent phenomenon in certain complex physical systems.

Re: Is consciousness part of the fabric of the universe?

#107

Post by FrustratedMonky »

jemmyw wrote: post #102
BasedAnon wrote: post #88

What's the deal with these things being lumped in with physics? This isn't physics this is just regular philosophy with some scientific sounding language. I feel like this is people reaching for religion but not wanting to admit it to themselves.

It's a shame to see so many comments engaged in this kind of pseudoscience. There's no evidence that consciousness is anything other than a state arising from the physical processes in our bodies. I'm open minded to hypothesis that are potentially testable, but people keep just repeating the implausible. I also hate that I keep reading that consciousness, or anything else, is a universe "hack" which is several levels…

I think that there is such a groundswell of articles about 'consciousness', right now, is because of the surge in AI and GPT.

If this is true. >"state arising from the physical processes"

Then nothing prevents silicon from eventually also being 'conscious'.

Carbon or Silicon, they are both a physical processes. Electrical potentials.

So the section of population that just can't abide that AI could be 'conscious' are finding all these more esoteric arguments about the universe being 'consciousness', quantum something or other, etc... To find 'some spark' in the human, some metaphysical argument, to keep us special.

Re: Is consciousness part of the fabric of the universe?

#108

Post by polishdude20 »

dbsmith83 wrote: post #73
swader999 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have a good grasp on this. Have you looked at Tom Campbell? He has a separate angle than Hoffman but very similar conclusions. The batshit crazy thing about Tom is that he shows you ways that you can individually experiment and prove through your own experiences the things he's positing. His My Big Toe trilogy goes into all this, but I shudder to recommend it. Tedious slog. If you really want to prove it to yours…

Have you ever conducted a simple experiment to prove you were not just lucid dreaming? It is a pretty easily falsifiable claim

Easy. Have someone go to the other room. OBE yourself into that room and see how many fingers they're holding up. Confirm if you were correct.

Re: Is consciousness part of the fabric of the universe?

#109

Post by asdff »

Say you have photographic memory, you take a big heavy book and read its contents end to end, converting written thought into conscious thought. How is this reaction balanced, if at all? Do thoughts have a mass? Are they able to be expanded infinitely without constraint? Are they even bound by laws like conservation of energy?

Re: Is consciousness part of the fabric of the universe?

#110

Post by orwin »

cscurmudgeon wrote: post #90
BasedAnon wrote: post #88

What's the deal with these things being lumped in with physics? This isn't physics this is just regular philosophy with some scientific sounding language. I feel like this is people reaching for religion but not wanting to admit it to themselves.

I hate that most education systems don’t teach that physics has its roots in philosophy and some of the most rigorous recent math stems from philosophy (Gödel) leading to vacuous gatekeeping comments like this.

When a philosophy has enough proofs and credibility, it becomes a science. Also, I do not think you can call logician philosophers. Lewis Carroll wouldn't.

Agree that the gatekeeping is a bit much, but doesn't warranted a swipe imho.

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