Consciousness is worth thinking about
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Re: Consciousness is worth thinking about
#2Imagine having consciousness having an evolutionary advantage. Imagine the possibility for a complex neural network to "bind" a part of external consciousness to itself. Then you have external but brain-trapped consciousness as an evolutionary possibility.
How to prove: First step is to find some creature with nerves but provably lacking consciousness.
Re: Consciousness is worth thinking about
#3I remember an aside in a neuroscience textbook which asked if, one day, a mystery like "where consciousness comes from" might seem as oddly posed as "where life comes from". Once you've broken "life" into its biological and chemical components - cells, proteins, chemical reactions - incredibly complex as they all are, the notion of "life", or of some kind of essential "life force" just kind of disintegrates. Once you get down to that microscopic level, the illusion breaks down.
Re: Consciousness is worth thinking about
#4Imagine having consciousness having an evolutionary advantage. Imagine the possibility for a complex neural network to "bind" a part of external consciousness to itself. Then you have external but brain-trapped consciousness as an evolutionary possibility. How to prove: First step is to find some creature with nerves but provably lacking consciousness.
> Imagine having consciousness having an evolutionary advantage.
Because consciousness exists among apparently successful species, it's a reasonable working hypothesis that it has survival value. In evolutionary studies, the burden of evidence is properly borne by those who would argue that an existing, seemingly adaptive trait doesn't have survival value.
> First step is to find some creature with nerves but provably lacking consciousness.
As to "provably", that can't be done. To prove a lack of consciousness, we would first have to create an objective positive test for consciousness. To do that, we would have to fully define and objectively quantify consciousness. We're nowhere near that stage.
Re: Consciousness is worth thinking about
#5Imagine having consciousness having an evolutionary advantage. Imagine the possibility for a complex neural network to "bind" a part of external consciousness to itself. Then you have external but brain-trapped consciousness as an evolutionary possibility. How to prove: First step is to find some creature with nerves but provably lacking consciousness.
> Imagine having consciousness having an evolutionary advantage. Because consciousness exists among apparently successful species, it's a reasonable working hypothesis that it has survival value. In evolutionary studies, the burden of evidence is properly borne by those who would argue that an existing, seemingly adaptive trait doesn't have survival value. > First step is to find some creature with nerves but provabl…
We can try to figure out how to create consciousness in something that didn't have it or remove consciousness from some living being, but we can't prove that we have a success before we understand what consciousness is.
By the way, if we were find why consciousness has evolutionary advantage we'll have a subset of what consciousness is. A set of traits for which we can test.
Re: Consciousness is worth thinking about
#6Whether David Chalmers believes that consciousness doesn't come from the brain depends on what you mean by "comes from." He believes that physics can completely describe the physical world; he does not believe in souls and interactionist/Cartesian dualism. Instead, he suggests that information may have both physical and mental manifestations.
While I once found this line of reasoning convincing, I'm no longer so sure it matters. While consciousness itself may be non-physical, under the assumption that physical effects have only physical causes, we should be able to explain why we say we are conscious in physical terms. I'm not sure that an explanation of the latter will also explain the former, but in the end, I don't think we will care. I think we will find that the everyday concept of "consciousness" mixes together many different ideas, each of which are simpler to solve on their own than they are when we consider them together.
Roughly a century ago we went through a similar process with the concept of life. People wanted to know what makes a thing alive, and many intelligent scientists were drawn to the idea that there is something innate to a living organism that makes it alive. After decades of biological research, we're still not sure what makes an organism alive, in the sense that the line between living organisms and inert biological material is not well-defined, but we know how living organisms reproduce and grow, and that's really what matters.
Re: Consciousness is worth thinking about
#7Imagine having consciousness having an evolutionary advantage. Imagine the possibility for a complex neural network to "bind" a part of external consciousness to itself. Then you have external but brain-trapped consciousness as an evolutionary possibility. How to prove: First step is to find some creature with nerves but provably lacking consciousness.
> How to prove: First step is to find some creature with nerves but provably lacking consciousness.
This doesn't seem entirely workable, since it's impossible to prove that anything is/isn't conscious without making auxiliary assumptions (Chalmers calls these "bridging principles"), and these auxiliary assumptions typically fall outside of scientific consensus. No one has conclusively proven that anything lacks consciousness, living or otherwise.
Re: Consciousness is worth thinking about
#8To put it kindly, I'd say this is sophomoric philosophy.
The OP suggests that "a more simple and elegant resolution to this paradox is that there is simply one consciousness, and that it alone observes (possibly, decides) these quantum states.".
This raises obvious the question: where does that consciousness come from? The author makes no attempt to address that problem. The answer he gives "the UNIVERSE is like ALL consciousness, man" doesn't really have substance.
There is other crackpottery, such as the claim that the material world is created by consciousness. This is unscientific (and lousy philosophy) because it's a philosophy that explains something without giving us any insight or deeper understanding.
The suggestion that "consciousness is the present moment" is also confused. Brains experience the present moment together because the present moment is part of the state of the individual brains. If two brains don't share any common input then they don't share the present moment either. Or to put it in a different way, we wouldn't share the present moment in a meaningful way either with a brain that lives in the same world as us but runs 1000x faster or 1000x slower.
I could pick this apart further, but I don't see the point. This article really isn't up to HN quality standards.
Re: Consciousness is worth thinking about
#9I remember an aside in a neuroscience textbook which asked if, one day, a mystery like "where consciousness comes from" might seem as oddly posed as "where life comes from". Once you've broken "life" into its biological and chemical components - cells, proteins, chemical reactions - incredibly complex as they all are, the notion of "life", or of some kind of essential "life force" just kind of disintegrates. Once you…
But with life, everything is physically observable. How you would observe conscious experience in something other than yourself? I don't mean the behaviors associated with consciousness, but conscious awareness itself?
People do a lot of handwaving around this issue and claim we've got it cracked just because we sorta know how the brain works, and yet we don't have a way even to detect whether this thing we're talking about exists. Much less do we know how it works, or how it's created. Our supposed scientific explanations are just a lot of mumbo jumbo when we can't even measure the thing we're talking about. We can detect brain activity, but we're just assuming that's the same thing.
I think ultimately this will be resolved experimentally, but we're a long way from accomplishing that.
Re: Consciousness is worth thinking about
#10I remember an aside in a neuroscience textbook which asked if, one day, a mystery like "where consciousness comes from" might seem as oddly posed as "where life comes from". Once you've broken "life" into its biological and chemical components - cells, proteins, chemical reactions - incredibly complex as they all are, the notion of "life", or of some kind of essential "life force" just kind of disintegrates. Once you…
Why are we drawing the line at "cells", "proteins" and "chemical reactions", you're going to have to get to the most fundamental level to really break down the illusion.