The unending quest to explain consciousness • Hacker News Board

Re: The unending quest to explain consciousness

#131

Post by yohsii » Fri, Dec 06, 2019, 2:47 PM UTC

incompatible wrote: post #85

mellosouls wrote: post #78

My personal preference is for panexperientialism (essentially a bare bones panpsychism), with the idea that the phenomenon is somehow connected with change, and belongs to anything capable of change in some way and is probably a fundamental property of nature, as fundamental as space or time. It's important to divorce consciousness from all ideas of "thought", "will" etc. to consider it's essence which is more connec…

Probably because consciousness requires some kind of underlying mental processes, which take time to achieve. I can only guess that it's similar to an instance of a computer program such as a web browser, i.e., it isn't a "thing" itself but is built out of a multitude of underlying calculations on a physical computer. This also implies to me that consciousness, not being a physical thing itself, comes and goes within…

consciousness does not require a brain. consciousness is fundamental to the universe

Re: The unending quest to explain consciousness

#132

Post by mannykannot » Fri, Dec 06, 2019, 2:48 PM UTC

acqq wrote: post #27

"It's very hard to change people's minds about something like consciousness, and I finally figured out the reason for that. The reason for that is that everybody's an expert on consciousness. (...) With regard to consciousness, people seem to think , each of us seems to think, " I am an expert. Simply by being conscious, I know all about this. " And so, you tell them your theory and they say, "No, no, that's not the…

On reading what was then the top comment on this article, I saw that it asserted as undeniably true a highly debatable proposition. I was about to reply, when I saw that the second did the same. The third was more of an aphorism that looked profound until you thought about it... There do seem to be a lot of people who want our consciousness to remain a mystery. I guess that it is vitalism's last stand.

FWIW, I think there is a 'hard problem' (more than one, in fact), but not the one Chalmers identifies; perhaps the hardest is 'how come we (think we) have free will?'

Re: The unending quest to explain consciousness

#133

Post by yohsii » Fri, Dec 06, 2019, 2:51 PM UTC

corporate_shi11 wrote: post #98

The closest we will ever come to describing consciousness is simply describing the correlates of consciousness. The "ultimate cause" of it will forever be a mystery, behind the veil. Consciousness appears to exist outside of the physical world, in that we can describe a physical process entirely without invoking consciousness. Because of this, consciousness is beyond the scientific method and our fundamental understa…

consume some 5meo-dmt and it's suddenly not beyond us anymore

Re: The unending quest to explain consciousness

#134

Post by xamuel » Fri, Dec 06, 2019, 2:51 PM UTC

OrderlyTiamat wrote: post #80

mantap wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could use an MRI machine to show that their brain activity is the same as yours, and if you know you are conscious then that should be evidence enough. Or you could just ask them.

An MRI scan, while incredible technology, is an indirect measure of an indirect measure of brain activity, has several seconds delay and a spatial resolution of a couple of millimeters. The "same" brain activity in two mri scans to me doesn't approach the kind of evidence I would be looking for here.

This. If building a conscious machine was as simple as building a machine that looks conscious on MRI, then it would be as simple as tape-recording a human brain.

Re: The unending quest to explain consciousness

#135

Post by CuriouslyC » Fri, Dec 06, 2019, 2:54 PM UTC

yohsii wrote: post #131

incompatible wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably because consciousness requires some kind of underlying mental processes, which take time to achieve. I can only guess that it's similar to an instance of a computer program such as a web browser, i.e., it isn't a "thing" itself but is built out of a multitude of underlying calculations on a physical computer. This also implies to me that consciousness, not being a physical thing itself, comes and goes within…

consciousness does not require a brain. consciousness is fundamental to the universe

Indeed. To go even farther, I suspect that there is nothing other than consciousness. There are no particles and forces, only awareness and will. The stuff of physics is emergent from statistical properties of consciousness over a large scale.

Re: The unending quest to explain consciousness

#136

Post by yohsii » Fri, Dec 06, 2019, 2:54 PM UTC

toasterlovin wrote: post #123

abnry wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

See, this seems entirely obvious to me but so many people are stuck with a 100% materialism worldview that they expect their to be some scientific "explanation" for consciousness. And that truly baffles me.

A materialistic approach to explaining consciousness is necessary, since consciousness can be affected by physical changes to the brain, which implies that consciousness is fundamentally a physical process.

fundamentally physical? consciousness is fundamental and eternal, no beginning no end. forms change and are not fundamental at all.

Re: The unending quest to explain consciousness

#137

Post by xamuel » Fri, Dec 06, 2019, 2:57 PM UTC

acqq wrote: post #27

"It's very hard to change people's minds about something like consciousness, and I finally figured out the reason for that. The reason for that is that everybody's an expert on consciousness. (...) With regard to consciousness, people seem to think , each of us seems to think, " I am an expert. Simply by being conscious, I know all about this. " And so, you tell them your theory and they say, "No, no, that's not the…

I think this is why the Socratic method is so effective. When Socrates would debate with someone, he would almost never just state claims as if he knew the answers. Rather, he would always act as if his audience was the expert and he himself knew nothing. Acting in that way, he would probe the audience. Invariably, the audience would begin answering questions as if they knew all the answers; and invariably, Socrates would lead them around until they tripped over their own feet and realized they didn't know what they were talking about.

Re: The unending quest to explain consciousness

#138

Post by mannykannot » Fri, Dec 06, 2019, 2:59 PM UTC

bblpeter wrote: post #3

If the Human Brain Were So Simple That We Could Understand It, We Would Be So Simple That We Couldn’t

We have had some success in understanding all sorts of phenomena that are too complex to explain in all their detail: we have a useful understanding of the meteorology of snowstorms, for example, even though we cannot give an accounting for the exact shape of every single snowflake. You have given us no reason to be sure that an understanding of this form cannot be achieved for consciousness.

To anticipate one possible reply: self-referentiality (our mind studying itself) is not self-evidently a barrier, as one mind can study another.

Re: The unending quest to explain consciousness

#139

Post by mantap » Fri, Dec 06, 2019, 3:05 PM UTC

adwn wrote: post #81

mantap wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could use an MRI machine to show that their brain activity is the same as yours, and if you know you are conscious then that should be evidence enough. Or you could just ask them.

> Or you could just ask them. I can easily make a computer program which, when asked "Are you conscious?", will reply with "Yes", but that doesn't mean that it is conscious. Conversely, you can ask someone who doesn't speak English, "Are you conscious?", and they will only stare at you confusedly, but that doesn't mean that they're not conscious. Therefore, "just asking" is not a reliable method at all to find out wh…

How could another human being be not-conscious while displaying all the signs of consciousness? Maybe I have a failure of imagination but if ask my mother "are you conscious?" and she says "yes" then that's pretty conclusive evidence to me. This is actually such a dumb thread I think I'm going to stop now.

Re: The unending quest to explain consciousness

#140

Post by Chathamization » Fri, Dec 06, 2019, 3:07 PM UTC

Tenoke wrote: post #126

corporate_shi11 wrote: post #98

The closest we will ever come to describing consciousness is simply describing the correlates of consciousness. The "ultimate cause" of it will forever be a mystery, behind the veil. Consciousness appears to exist outside of the physical world, in that we can describe a physical process entirely without invoking consciousness. Because of this, consciousness is beyond the scientific method and our fundamental understa…

>Consciousness appears to exist outside of the physical world, in that we can describe a physical process entirely without invoking consciousness. Only in the same ways that e.g. emotions exist 'outside of the physical world' and we are doing some work with those (e.g. we know more about the effects of hormones on them now). I completely disagree that this is unstudiable or 'behind the veil'. We can create beings wit…

The non-materialist argument is similar to creationist critiques of evolution. Scientists who study these things see a material explanation, but because these are enormously complex emergent properties they don't know the exact details. Critics then use a god of the gaps argument, saying that if a material explanation can't explain everything right now then a supernatural explanation (which which explains far less and runs counter to available evidence) should be favored. Behind both arguments lie an unease that the scientific approach knocks humans off their pedestal and makes them seem like everything else.

It's not surprising that the only neuroscientist in the article is arguing for a materialist approach.