231–240 of 326 posts
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.
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> 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…
Why would I care what answer the LLM gives to a question like, say, Are you conscious? A one-line Bash script can claim to be conscious, but offers no insight whatever into the nature of consciousness.
We've known for some time that general anesthetics can suspend consciousness. 'Neural correlate' studies give a more detailed understanding of the relationship between brain activity and consciousness. These are of limited value to philosophy of consciousness, though. AI experimentation strikes me as having even less applicability.
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> We can invert this and ask, if physicality is not ideal, then how do we come to know it? Why would we ask that? Not ideal for what? It just is. > The third option is that physics is unable to interrogate itself. This is likely true. We are the product of physics and we can only delve so deep. It might be that we cannot see to the most fundamental level(s). That's not a third option though, that's just the state of…
> Why would we ask that? Not ideal for what? It just is. I'm pretty sure GP was using "ideal" in the sense of "made up of ideas", as in the philosophical concept of idealism, which is essentially the opposite of materialism: idealism is the position that the real world is that of the mind, and physics and the physical world is an emergent property of our minds, not the other way around. Not that I think this is a rea…
Why is it not a "real coherent position worth discussing"?
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Yeah, I’ve believed for most of my life that consciousness is some emergent thing that arises from the interaction of all the complex biological processes of our brain and its sensory input. Most people don’t like to hear this though, and I don’t express the idea often - it’s disappointing to consider this possibility (I consider it certain, as I’ve observed nothing to suggest otherwise).
Imagine there's no internet and you don't have a dictionary. When you've never observed the Eiffel tower and someone tells you the Eiffel Tower exists, will you tell them that they're wrong? "There's no evidence that the Eiffel Tower exists." Do you have any evidence the Eiffel Tower does not exist? No? Then it makes no sense to assume you know what's reality. The reason, why you insist that it doesn't exist, is beca…
If you try to explain consciousness as just the state of a physical brain, all the observations agree with you. The brain is known to be capable of computing. There are known regions inside it that activate when the subject feels certain emotions and thinks a certain kind of thoughts. There are regions that have predictable effects on the person's consciousness when damaged (see lobotomy). _And_ this hypothesis doesn't contradict any observations made until now (which is not the only argument as you're implying, just one of them, and a good one).
If you try to explain consciousness as something else, you have to change the laws of physics. You have to consider that _something_ exists that isn't in the current theories, just to explain a phenomenon that shows no evidence of needing that. There's no data to guess what it is, how it behaves, why it exists, whether it interacts with anything. Actually, you could say that all the evidence until now proves that it doesn't interact with anything in a measurable way, besides brainwaves (which are just regular electrical activity in the nervous system) and whatever the body does (which is explained by nerve signals coming from the brain).
To believe that something exists, you make observations that your current theory can't explain and try to explain them. Here the root observation is that we "feel" conscious, we feel that we are something more than the physical objects that are our bodies. This is an observation about the state of our brains, it's not an observation about the rest of the world. It doesn't need any new laws of physics to be understood and it doesn't give us any data that we could use to build such a law. The only reason you're giving weight to this is that you are wired to see humans as something special. It's a reflection of the way you think. When you correct for that bias, there's nothing left.
It's much like believing that a god exists, built the universe, looks and thinks and feels like a human, and wants us to be good. It's so obviously something that humans naturally want to think because it matches with their inner biases that it's not worth considering as a scientific hypothesis. It's completely explained by the brain being wired to see humans (and living things in general) as something "special" because that helped with natural selection.
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Imagine there's no internet and you don't have a dictionary. When you've never observed the Eiffel tower and someone tells you the Eiffel Tower exists, will you tell them that they're wrong? "There's no evidence that the Eiffel Tower exists." Do you have any evidence the Eiffel Tower does not exist? No? Then it makes no sense to assume you know what's reality. The reason, why you insist that it doesn't exist, is beca…
That's a weak argument. The reason some of us don't believe that consciousness is something else than the state of a brain following physical processes is that the latter is a much simpler theory and matches every objective observation we can make. If you try to explain consciousness as just the state of a physical brain, all the observations agree with you. The brain is known to be capable of computing. There are kn…
Uh, no. The reason why you need a "conscious" universe is precisely beause humans aren't special. In a conscious universe model, the brain "abuses" the laws of physics including whatever laws that relate to consciousness to result in an organism with higher environmental fitness.
I am more than willing to consider a robot or a wet piece of cloth as conscious, but the problem is that you need to somehow unify these incredibly different experiences as conscious.
The people who believe that consciousness is just the result of processes in the brain also believe that a computer can become conscious given the right program, but this is nonsense, because the computer hardware already has all of the hardware to perform lesser forms of consciousness. The "thoughts" of a processor don't have to be in the form of human intelligence that can be easily observed. The idea that consciousness suddenly turns on because you load a carefully crafted file from your SSD into RAM and turns off if you zero it out, is what is ridiculous to me and that is exactly what "the brain gives rise to consciousness" says to me. After all, if you could somehow simulate the brain of a crow or any other animal, you would not be able to understand what the animal is saying and discount it's consciousness the same way we discount the consciousness of farm animals. So for me, your explanation is the one that makes humans special.
I have been imersing myself in this subject and the gist of what I got is that consciousness collapses under the reductionist process currently employed in the scientific method. Moreover, the very framework in which the current scientific work is done might well be just an emergent data structure used by what we understand as consciousness to navigate whatever the objective reality is in a way that is simpler and mo…
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There are plenty of reasons to believe it's physical. I mean, in some ways I can't believe I'm having to write "there are no ghosts" to a technically minded community. If consciousness was not physical then where is it? Why would it switch on and off with physical changes to brains? Why would you be able to get altered states of consciousness with chemicals, disease and age? Why would be be able to marry some conscio…
Yeah I’m not sure why someone would argue that consciousness isn’t physical. Take a conscious person and knock them hard in the head. Interesting, their consciousness is altered. Take drugs? Check it out, consciousness altered. People who experience head trauma have their personality permanently altered. In the course of life you will likely directly observe the effects of physical injury on a person’s consciousness,…
Meanwhile others think that the knocked out human and the corpse and the average human are all conscious, but they experience their respective consciousnessess aka the consciousness of an average human, knocked out human or corpse. You could say that this is just a disagreement in what the word conscious means.
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Yeah I’m not sure why someone would argue that consciousness isn’t physical. Take a conscious person and knock them hard in the head. Interesting, their consciousness is altered. Take drugs? Check it out, consciousness altered. People who experience head trauma have their personality permanently altered. In the course of life you will likely directly observe the effects of physical injury on a person’s consciousness,…
> Yeah I’m not sure why someone would argue that consciousness isn’t physical Reading the comments, one thing that's been unsaid is whether each person discussing is religious/spiritual or not. My guess is that if you are religious then the idea of there being another layer in the universe goes without saying, and if you are not then it's ridiculous. It's probably a waste of time debating across that line.
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What you pose is just the basis for the question, not a possible answer to it. A null hypothesis must still be a hypothesis, not a subtly vague hedge that doesn't actually posit anything. It may be that the tools science provides are inadequate for this question in which case the question is ill-posed, but in any case your interpretation of what a hypothesis is, is simply incorrect.
In reply to both yourself and FollowingTheDao: the concept of a null hypothesis is from the analysis of quantitative data. For either of the null hypotheses posited in this thread, what are the corresponding data?
If consciousness is "the state of being awake and aware of one's surroundings" then it depends on dualism, ie, this and that. Is the fabric of the universe dual or non-dual? If it is non-dual it can have no consciousness. Because the universe would be able to see a "non-universe". IMHO, consciousness arises out of the universe via the creation of duality by the human mind. The fabric is unknowable and that frustrates…
The connection of memory to consciousness is a fascinating thing to consider. If we had no memory whatsoever, then even with our huge brains I suspect we'd be as conscious as a plant, or possibly even less so (plants have timekeeping ability and thats a rudimentary memory of sorts). Perhaps 'blue' and 'chocolatey' are the interpretations a memory state makes of new input.
For more on 'blue' and 'chocolatey', check out this video...
How did consciousness evolve - with Nicholas Humphrey
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9QWaZp_2I1k
I want to add as well that genetics are a type of memory as well, and there might be two types of "conscioucness", one of the brain and one of the body.