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No, really—consciousness is worth thinking about

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Re: No, really—consciousness is worth thinking about

#121

Post by EGreg »

mcguire wrote: post #97
EGreg wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you know that there are no other components besides the brain that cause there to be subjective experience? One might very well suspect that there is something more, considering that no arrangement of physical parts has come close to qualitatively being the same as a subjective experience. Your soul could be observing your body and being affected by it. While your memories and feelings are in the body, your su…

How does your soul observe and affect your body? (I'm assuming you mean a two-way path there; "observing your body and being affected by it" would be one-way, and would be problematic. "A difference that makes no difference", and all.) Can this connection be distorted or interrupted? What are the effects of doing so? If you accept that a drug-induced solipsistic, out-of-body effect[1] is an alteration of subjective e…

Imagine looking out the window and seeing stuff that is happening outside. If the window gets foggy, you don't experience everything that's happening outside the window. That doesn't disprove that you are observing stuff outside the window.

On the other hand, having "uncaused effects" has been found in quantum mechanics, but it's too much of a leap to suppose that your consciousness controls your body through quantum mechanical probability. Although there's something eerie about the waveform collapse having to do with conscious observers.

Re: No, really—consciousness is worth thinking about

#122

Post by foobarbazqux »

seiji wrote: post #66
EGreg wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you know that there are no other components besides the brain that cause there to be subjective experience? One might very well suspect that there is something more, considering that no arrangement of physical parts has come close to qualitatively being the same as a subjective experience. Your soul could be observing your body and being affected by it. While your memories and feelings are in the body, your su…

no arrangement of physical parts has come close to qualitatively being the same as a subjective experience. This isn't a one time affair. Every human carries DNA explaining exactly how to create more intelligent conscious creatures. It doesn't take "special conditions." It happens in squalor, mud huts, ice, desert, famine, over excess—everywhere. We are self-replacing nanomachines looking like individual discrete ent…

> You are entirely your brain. Nothing more, nothing less.

Clearly I am only a portion of my brain since if you remove some of it I am still me. But then, if you start killing the neurons in my brain one by one, at what point do I stop being me?

Re: No, really—consciousness is worth thinking about

#123

Post by shuaib »

If all my memories are copied over to a humanoid robot, and that robot claims to be me, given access to all my memories. Is he really me? What if the actual me is standing right next to it? Are there now two me? Or is the robot just faking it? But if it's the latter, how do we know I am not faking someone else's consciousness (i.e. not the robot, but I is the one faking)?

Re: No, really—consciousness is worth thinking about

#124

Post by csallen »

JackFr wrote: post #107
csallen wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Science is not an opinionated entity that "explains" things. Rather, it is a method for learning more about the world around us while attempting to minimize influence from bias and other sources of human error. It's not that we can only discover things via science. It's just that we shouldn't trust discoveries made via flashes of insight, clairvoyance, intuition, guesswork, divine inspiration, etc.

"It's not that we can only discover things via science. It's just that we shouldn't trust discoveries made via flashes of insight, clairvoyance, intuition, guesswork, divine inspiration, etc." If we can't trust discoveries through non-scientific means, than it seems to me you are saying we can only discover things via science. So if I have continuing experience of something so far yet to be confined within an ordered…

I don't understand your question, exactly, so forgive me if my response seems off. But what are you to do? Nothing special. Just refrain from jumping to conclusions. Instead, say, "I don't know." Which is the same thing the ancient Greeks should've done when asked why the sun travels across the sky, rather than assuming that Apollo drags it behind his magical chariot.

Re: No, really—consciousness is worth thinking about

#125

Post by dylangs1030 »

anigbrowl wrote: post #49

Personally I lean towards the idea of consciousness as an emergent phenomenon, ie closer to Hofstadter than Searle (for anyone who has wondered exactly what Godel, Escher, Bach is about, it's essentially a long argument for strong AI). However, I'm not sure about this; the main reason I can't subscribe to Searle's point of view is that he's trying to prove a negative, and I'd rather not know the answer than handwave…

I never came across The Origin of Consciousness - what makes it "monumentally good" in your opinion?

Re: No, really—consciousness is worth thinking about

#126

Post by dschiptsov »

Some very bright people, notably Chomsky, Minsky and Kurzweil are advocating utilitarian, "mechanical" nature of the mind, which is much more useful than any religious/mysterious crap.

Very crudely, language is just neural network training (due to repeated exposure) and pattern matching on what what was trained. This oversimplified model nevertheless could explain the whole phenomena very well. We do not memorizing grammars, for example, but we are able to distinguish well-formed sentence form nonsense just because it doesn't match the common structure we were trained.

People who started to study their second language as adult would tell you that sentences are not deliberately "constructed" according to the memorized rules as it is when we begin to getting familiar with a new language, but "emerge by itself" after some training. So we have no grammars inside our brain, but a mechanism to train to build up one.

The consciousness, according to the same views, is nothing but a "current working buffer" for ongoing processes, and as some "activity" exceeds some threshold it acquires a "focus" , as if we are "switching" to it.

Minsky have stated many times, that it will require years until people will start using such vocabulary from the world of complex systems in attempts to describe what's going instead of Froidian or common-sense memes.

There is a course based on his Society of Mind book on MIT Open Courseware - very nice talks to listen.

Re: No, really—consciousness is worth thinking about

#127

Post by sveme »

TelmoMenezes wrote: post #6
Xcelerate wrote: post #4

I upvoted the original article not necessarily because I thought it was particularly well-written, but because I looked forward to seeing what the HN comments about the article would say. Nevertheless, I left to go somewhere before I had a chance to peruse them. I think in a conversation about consciousness, it's very important to define exactly what it is you're talking about. I'm not a neuroscientist, but I get the…

Neuroscience hasn't been able to produce a single theory on the origin of consciousness, unless one accepts "it emerges from neural activity" as an explanation. Consciousness appears to be the ultimate mystery. There is something very fundamental about it that we don't understand at all. This makes a lot of people uncomfortable, especially the type of people that would like to turn Science into a religion. We just do…

There are actually highly interesting developments at the intersection of philosophy and neuroscience, one of them being the works of Thomas Metzinger (see, e.g., http://www.amazon.com/Being-No-One-Self-Model-Subjectivity/d...).

It's simply wrong to state that research into consciousness is at the state of "it emerges from neural activity".

Re: No, really—consciousness is worth thinking about

#128

Post by sveme »

I agree to some extent with your assessment, however, I also had some issues with the original post and could understand the anger of people that delved (much) deeper into the subject. I am not expecting a blog post to be a well-thought and rigorous scientific article, but expect strength in argumentation when extraordinary or broad statements are made. Specifically, he used

* lots of hand-waving arguments (something along "that is contradictory", even though it is not clear why it should be contradictory) * the evocation of quantum mechanics. Whenever I see someone mention quantum mechanics as an explanation without explaining its association any further, a red flag is raised. Somehow the weirdness of parts of quantum mechanics has lead it to be used as an all-encompassing explanation for all other sorts of phenomena. Homeopathy being a prime example. * the fact that current, "mainstream" research into consciousness has been so easily dismissed without knowing something about it (beyond a youtube video).

Some works that I found particularly inspiring (and well-thought) are Thomas Metzinger's work, e.g., Being No One http://www.amazon.com/Being-No-One-Self-Model-Subjectivity/d..., for the layman Antonio Damasio's work, Christof Koch, Francisco Varela, just to mention a few.

Re: No, really—consciousness is worth thinking about

#130

Post by sjs1234 »

TelmoMenezes wrote: post #6
Xcelerate wrote: post #4

I upvoted the original article not necessarily because I thought it was particularly well-written, but because I looked forward to seeing what the HN comments about the article would say. Nevertheless, I left to go somewhere before I had a chance to peruse them. I think in a conversation about consciousness, it's very important to define exactly what it is you're talking about. I'm not a neuroscientist, but I get the…

Neuroscience hasn't been able to produce a single theory on the origin of consciousness, unless one accepts "it emerges from neural activity" as an explanation. Consciousness appears to be the ultimate mystery. There is something very fundamental about it that we don't understand at all. This makes a lot of people uncomfortable, especially the type of people that would like to turn Science into a religion. We just do…

Antonio Damasio is a neuroscientist. He has a theory of consciousness explained in a book called the feeling of what happens. The somatic marker hypothesis is a bit more than 'it emerges from neural activity' At the very minimum the book debunks a good number of otherwise plausible sounding theories. Damasio in that book also does a fantastic job of removing any mysticism from the exercise ... He's trying to explain what each of us recognize as conciousness in other animals. E.g. Many people think their dogs are concious without also holding mystical beliefs.
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