Is Matter Conscious? (2017) • Hacker News Board

Re: Is Matter Conscious? (2017)

#151

Post by cam_l » Mon, Feb 25, 2019, 8:15 AM UTC

Ste_Evans wrote: post #129

cam_l wrote: post #127

My favourite explanation of the emergence of consciousness inherent in matter is an article by Elizabeth Grosz. It makes an argument for what i guess is a version of panpsychism that sounds, philosophically, very practical. http://www.parrhesiajournal.org/parrhesia15/parrhesia15_gros...

Yes, but the problem is it is contradicted by scientific observation: http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2019/01/electrons-dont-thin... What do we call academics who ignore current knowledge that contradicts their ideas? Cranks. A subset of cranks being most "philosophers".

The paper i posted makes no such claims. It build up an idea of human consciousness as an emergence from the inherent properties of the interactions of elements, chemical bonds and environment.

That human consciousness is a function of the boundary between the brain and the environment across which senses pass; the internal processes virtualising the external environment. The human consciousness then also has awareness of itself, sensed across the boundary, and re-virtualised within; akin to Hofstadter's loop.

At the same time, Grosz breaks down the concept of consciousness in the other direction, looking at this idea of virtualization within a sensing boundary in a single cell organism. The mechanism of such consciousness can be understood in this case as a mere transfer of information. From there its turtles all the way down.

Such a view is well within the standard model.

Re: Is Matter Conscious? (2017)

#152

Post by Ste_Evans » Mon, Feb 25, 2019, 8:16 AM UTC

Ste_Evans wrote: post #147

pcpcpc wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For anyone else reading this comment and curious about Buddhism and Panpsychism, here are some links. Buddhism suggests that the perception of the boundary of the self (I am a distinct, separate being) is a delusion/wrong view. Perhaps we experience a shared universal consciousness (with discreet elements?) passing through ourselves like a river with drops of water flowing through it, evaporating, and then falling so…

Excellent! Thanks! Do you have any links for those curious about witchcraft and voodoo?

Any links for Americans curious about sarcasm?

Re: Is Matter Conscious? (2017)

#153

Post by Gupie » Mon, Feb 25, 2019, 8:25 AM UTC

hackinthebochs wrote: post #108

tigerlily wrote: post #16

I could have been born at any time, in any place in the universe - or not at all, for that matter. Why do I get to experience the universe in a unique way? What gives rise to this?

The question probably stems from the fact that we tend to identify with our conscious experience more than we do our physical body. So it seems reasonable to imagine this conscious experience separated from one body and placed in another body. But this is a mistake. Your body owns its conscious processes in the same way your body owns its process of digestion. There is no way to identify you separately from the physi…

What if we are AIs in a simulation? Unlikely perhaps but not impossible. In this case there is no body only mind and all options are open.

There is also the theories that consciousness is all that exists, e.g. "Donald Hoffman's Multimodal User Interface (MMUI) theory of reality and doctrine of Conscious Realism together posit that the reality humans perceive is like a simulation in which non-physical conscious agents interact in order to generate the dynamics we observe".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_D._Hoffman

Re: Is Matter Conscious? (2017)

#154

Post by yokljo » Mon, Feb 25, 2019, 8:28 AM UTC

yokljo wrote: post #113

What if your consciousness exists outside your physical brain, and within your brain is basically an aerial that is "tuned to your frequency", so no matter where you are your brain will always communicate with the same consciousness. I suppose with that theory comes the ability for two brains to tune into the same consciousness, and various other fun implications. Is there already a name for this?

Another fun implication if it really were aerial-like, is that our consciousness would have a sort of "maximum bandwidth".

I think this theory is actually pretty convincing. It would be awful if you were conscious of every single thing your brain did, including all your subconscious thoughts and motor neurons firing.

That is why you are conscious of much more specific things like vision, hearing, touch and so forth. Generally the signals within your brain would be akin to random data, so surely they would be post-processed by your brain into a useful contiguous "conscious-ready" signal.

That post-processed signal would probably be sent from one location, and therefore the aerial analogy works well. When you go under general anaesthetic, that specific part of the brain would stop transmitting completely and you don't experience a single thing until it wears off and it starts transmitting again.

When you sleep and dream, the signal is just a mess of neatly post-processed signals coming from different parts of your brain, so you are still basically conscious.

I read somewhere that if you stimulate a particular part of someone's brain, it can make them temporarily unconscious, which would make sense with the aerial analogy.

If that's how it works, then maybe our sense of time passing is directly proportional to the amount of data sent. So if your brain transmits a lot of stuff in a short time, that short real-time seems like a long conscious-time, and vice versa.

It's clearly a flawless theory ;)

Re: Is Matter Conscious? (2017)

#155

Post by Ste_Evans » Mon, Feb 25, 2019, 8:28 AM UTC

cam_l wrote: post #151

Ste_Evans wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but the problem is it is contradicted by scientific observation: http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2019/01/electrons-dont-thin... What do we call academics who ignore current knowledge that contradicts their ideas? Cranks. A subset of cranks being most "philosophers".

The paper i posted makes no such claims. It build up an idea of human consciousness as an emergence from the inherent properties of the interactions of elements, chemical bonds and environment. That human consciousness is a function of the boundary between the brain and the environment across which senses pass; the internal processes virtualising the external environment. The human consciousness then also has awarene…

It's simply saying that "consciousness" is related to the brain, but doesn't explain the subjective feeling of consciousness.

The stuff about the single cell organism's supposed consciousness is just a lame analogy.

This is what you can do if you are a "philosopher" - just sniff some glue and write stuff down.

Re: Is Matter Conscious? (2017)

#156

Post by yesenadam » Mon, Feb 25, 2019, 8:28 AM UTC

blueadept111 wrote: post #96

This is one of the very few articles I've read about the nature of consciousness where the ideas presented are cogent, consistent, and novel (to me). She does a terrific job of explaining the current state of affairs in philosophy of mind, about as clearly as anyone could, and then describing a new paradigm.

Yes, I read it after reading the comments on this page, expecting a silly mess. But no, it was well-written, for that kind of piece - it's popular internet journalism, not a professional philosophy journal, people! For what it's worth, the 'matter is made from consciousness' view does seem unlikely in the extreme to me.

I thought it was strange the term '(philosophical) idealism' wasn't used once, as it seems that's what most of the article was describing. Maybe she didn't want to confuse people with the more common meaning of 'idealism' today (to do with ideals, not ideas). Russell was a Hegelian idealist for a few years in the mid-1890s, like a lot of British (and American) philosophers, and published a book on Leibniz in 1900. (It's probably not a great introduction to the subject, but David Stove's Idealism: A Victorian Horror-Story is a very funny long essay by the Australia philosopher, mostly ridiculing the arguments used in support of idealism, in detail. Stove's Gem - winner of his Worst Argument in the World competition[0] - is worth being able to recognize in the wild.)

[0] https://web.maths.unsw.edu.au/~jim/worst.html

Re: Is Matter Conscious? (2017)

#157

Post by filoeleven » Mon, Feb 25, 2019, 8:31 AM UTC

yokljo wrote: post #113

What if your consciousness exists outside your physical brain, and within your brain is basically an aerial that is "tuned to your frequency", so no matter where you are your brain will always communicate with the same consciousness. I suppose with that theory comes the ability for two brains to tune into the same consciousness, and various other fun implications. Is there already a name for this?

This is pretty close to the filter theory or transmission theory of consciousness, described by William James and FWH Myers over a century ago.

In their view, consciousness is far more vast than we are aware of, and our brains filter most of it out in the same way that they filter out all kinds of stimuli they deem unimportant to physical survival. All kinds of physical events can affect the parameters of the filtering: near-death experiences, psychedelic drugs, deep meditation, stroke, hunger...essentially anything that changes the brain modifies which parts and how much of the spectrum of consciousness gets through to an individual’s experience.

Re: Is Matter Conscious? (2017)

#158

Post by seventhtiger » Mon, Feb 25, 2019, 8:51 AM UTC

trixie_ wrote: post #88

paraschopra wrote: post #84

Panpsychism is exciting. But there are two problems in it. One is the combination problem: what sort of collection of atoms are conscious and what are not. If you propose then that only agents or complex systems are conscious, you are faced with the second problem: the boundary condition. What do you call an agent, and why? I’m ultimately hopeful that subjective experience will come to be seen as something fundamenta…

I think panpsychism argues that everything is conscious, at all levels, simultaneously. There are no boundaries. What you experience as a boundary is just the limit of your awareness. Just as you don't consciously beat your heart or heal your wounds. And if you think about it a lot it's tough to really tell where your own boundary brain/body ends and the environment begins. I like the panpsychism stuff because it res…

I like it aesthetically, but fundamentally I think it dodges the question. It dilutes consciousness to be mostly unconscious, and then it can be applied to anything.

I like the idea that everything is conscious, but without diluting what consciousness is. It's anthrocentric and magical, thinking that atoms have inner monologues and concepts of self, but it's better defined than the panpsychist consciousness as you describe it.

Re: Is Matter Conscious? (2017)

#159

Post by yreg » Mon, Feb 25, 2019, 9:01 AM UTC

The other way to look at this is that consciousness emerges from a certain kind of structure and processes independent of the matter it is represented on.

Consciousness would emerge in our brains from the neural structure and activity, but it would also emerge when computed in a computer simulation or (as a thought experiment) calculations on paper or xkcd-esque pebbles in sand.

That would make the computer, calculations on paper and pebbles in the sand as conscious as a human.

Which, admittedly sounds just as crazy as the idea of consciousness being tied to all matter.

Re: Is Matter Conscious? (2017)

#160

Post by AllegedAlec » Mon, Feb 25, 2019, 9:17 AM UTC

It's a good thing that Betteridge's law of headlines continues to be true.

I never understood the appeal of this idea, to be honest. This article also doesn't seem to think there are any strong arguments for it. Or at least, if the writer has them, they do not present them in any cogent way, instead piling appeal to emotions one upon the other until the entire thing collapses under its own weight.