Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The unending quest to explain consciousness

bookforum.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

181–190 of 255 posts

Re: The unending quest to explain consciousness

#181

Post by SketchySeaBeast »

toasterlovin wrote: post #164
yohsii wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Aspects of consciousness can be affected by brain injuries. So, yes, fundamentally physical.

Also anesthesia. The few times I've been under it I can definitively say I wasn't conscious - it was a light switch being flipped. I existed, I ceased, I resumed. No passage of time, no half-remembered dreams, nothing in the middle at all. An entirely chemically induced unconscious state.

Re: The unending quest to explain consciousness

#182

Post by yohsii »

SketchySeaBeast wrote: post #149
yohsii wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> consciousness is fundamental and eternal, no beginning no end What makes you think that? It seems to begin at some point after conception, and end upon death. I've yet to see evidence indicating otherwise.

you were conscious before your life and you will be after it. it may be a different type of consciousness and not attached to your ego or current identity, but you will always have consciousness. if you are a materialist, you will never be able to explain the origin of anything as there will always be a level before. consciousness needs no beginning, it has always been and will always be, your true identity is God and you (not your current identity/ego) are immortal.

Re: The unending quest to explain consciousness

#183

Post by corporate_shi11 »

Chathamization wrote: post #140
Tenoke wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 an…

I think you miss the point of the hard problem of consciousness.

No one is capable of offering any physical sort of coherent explanation for the experience of consciousness.

There is no process in the brain that, if discovered, would lead to an "aha!" moment about the source of qualia. We could understand the physical law governing every single atom in the brain and simulate it with the best achievable accuracy and still not understand anything more about the emergence of qualia than we do now.

Similarly, there is no coherent metaphysical or mystical explanation for consciousness. Such an explanation would have to invoke some interaction between a non physical world and the physical world, which is an absurd notion for multiple reasons.

I believe consciousness for humans is the equivalent of differential equations for amoeba. It is beyond our comprehension.

Re: The unending quest to explain consciousness

#184

Post by SketchySeaBeast »

yohsii wrote: post #182
SketchySeaBeast wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> consciousness is fundamental and eternal, no beginning no end What makes you think that? It seems to begin at some point after conception, and end upon death. I've yet to see evidence indicating otherwise.

you were conscious before your life and you will be after it. it may be a different type of consciousness and not attached to your ego or current identity, but you will always have consciousness. if you are a materialist, you will never be able to explain the origin of anything as there will always be a level before. consciousness needs no beginning, it has always been and will always be, your true identity is God an…

You're not describing consciousness - you're trying to hide spirituality and religion in scientific terms, and making utterly unverifiable claims from nothing. This is what you'd like, but not what you have any evidence for. If you're going to make that sort of claim, call it spirit, or soul, but consciousness is a clearly defined concept that you have to actually break the definition of in order to make these claims - how can we have consciousness that we aren't aware of, when that is literally what consciousness is, awareness?

Re: The unending quest to explain consciousness

#185

Post by ghjyui »

cygx wrote: post #66
gear54rus wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Information could be encoded in molecule oscillations and therefore 2 rocks of different temperatures would communicate it when touching (heat transfer would occur). Can this be considered processing?

It's doubtful you'll be able to make such a scheme work: Information processing tends to involve storage and retrieval of data. That's not really possible in the thermodynamic regime. You'd have to do all your processing before the information gets lost to thermalization.

Image recognition needs no storage or retrieval of data: it's a single pass thru a series of matrix multiplications. Yet, image recognition is the very definition of data processing.

Re: The unending quest to explain consciousness

#186

Post by normalnorm »

stromgo wrote: post #124
normalnorm wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can point to a protein being expressed by DNA, and then understand how many protein molecules amount to cells, then tissues, then organs. There is a first principle guiding you all the way, even though the complexity is staggering. There is no such first principle with interactions of neurons, in the sense that we know of no quality or property of a neuron that could amount to the phenomena "consciousness", in th…

Consciousness is a computation, and neurons are certainly capable of elementary computation. So the building block has been pointed at (neurons), and its property given (computation). Is the problem that you don't believe that consciousness can emerge from elementary computation, or you believe that it is possible but we have no proof of it?

I have no problem with agreeing that computation can emerge from neurons. For example, one can show how different neural configurations correspond to logic gates, persistent memory (this requires recurrence) and so on. This is precisely what I mean by valid emergentist models. No magic steps, just complexity.

The problem is that you start by stating that "consciousness is a computation", but I don't know if this is true, and neither do you.

> Is the problem that you don't believe that consciousness can emerge from elementary computation, or you believe that it is possible but we have no proof of it?

My problem is that your hypothesis that "consciousness is a computation" is not testable, and so it does not count as a scientific theory (according to the standard Popperian falsifiability criterion).

Unless/until we have a scientific instrument that measures consciousness, we are just assuming things. I assume that other humans are conscious (by analogy), but I don't know it to be true in a scientific sense.

So it's not a matter of what I believe or not, it's a matter of what science can investigate or not. So far, it looks like the phenomenon of consciousness is beyond its grasp.

Re: The unending quest to explain consciousness

#187

Post by ghjyui »

Tenoke wrote: post #128
riskneutral wrote: post #121

The last sentence sums it up: “if you simply rule in advance that the mind must be physical and assume that an understanding of consciousness must be a materialist understanding, because scientific materialism is obviously correct, you end up looking for your keys under the streetlamp because that’s where the light is.“

We have good reasons to believe that everything is under the streetlamp, and little reason to think that there is something immaterial or irreducible. This is a totally different debate though - 'Is materialism/phyiscalism/reductionism etc. correct?'.

Irreducibility may be a thing, e.g. turbulence. For example, we can easily make an ML model that recognizes an image or speech and we can explain every little detail about how it works, but we can't explain the high level emergent dynamics of this model and thus can't really explain how it works. I believe we'll build a real AI soon, it'll exceed all expectations, and we still be puzzled by the complexity of it's turbulent emergent dynamics. In other words, if we could ask an oracle how cognition works, he would write a bunch of diff equations followed by a million volumes of hard math theorems and the complexity will be so irreducible that by the time we start reading volume 2, we'd forget volume 1. Yet another way to look at it. We can imagine a square because it's a simple object. However we can't imagine a 10 dimensional calabi yau manifold no matter how hard we try: it has more complexity that fits into our brains. If the theory behind cognition is as irreducible as that manifold, well never "get" it, even though we'll be able to describe all its local properties.

Re: The unending quest to explain consciousness

#188

Post by cygx »

ghjyui wrote: post #185
cygx wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's doubtful you'll be able to make such a scheme work: Information processing tends to involve storage and retrieval of data. That's not really possible in the thermodynamic regime. You'd have to do all your processing before the information gets lost to thermalization.

Image recognition needs no storage or retrieval of data: it's a single pass thru a series of matrix multiplications. Yet, image recognition is the very definition of data processing.

How do you propose to perform calculations without data storage (think registers)?

Re: The unending quest to explain consciousness

#189

Post by SketchySeaBeast »

incompatible wrote: post #88
plutonorm wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not entertain the notion that matter is consciousness? It doesn't just feel like something to be a particular atom, that particular atom exists because it feels like something to be that particular atom.

If my consciousness is only the consciousness of a particular atom, or more likely a fundamental particle like an electron, why do I have the illusion that I'm an entire human animal? How would my vision, for example, be sent to every election in my body, for it to be independently conscious?

And why can cancer hide from my consciousness? If we are a single particle, we can't possibly interact with the others in the way we do - why is that one particle special. And if we are a gestalt, why is it that some of the parts are less important than others. Nerves nicely explain why we are more aware of our hands and lips than the action of our appendix - a singular atomic consciousness can't, and neither can an equally weighted gestalt.

Re: The unending quest to explain consciousness

#190

Post by dwaltrip »

rebuilder wrote: post #171
dwaltrip wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you are human, you are conscious. Consciousness is to humans in the same way breathing is to humans. There are many other arguments that I'm sure you are aware of. If all of these aren't enough for you, well then, I would direct you towards exploring solipsism.

I don't see the relevance of solipsism here. I'm taking essentially the opposite position: I am not conscious. You seem to think I am conscious. How can you tell the difference?

If you genuinely don't think you are conscious, then I have nothing to say.

If you are making a roundabout point of how we can't know if other people are conscious, then my argument about solipsism stands.

Post reply on HN