Is consciousness part of the fabric of the universe? • Hacker News Board

Re: Is consciousness part of the fabric of the universe?

#191

Post by amatecha » Sun, Oct 01, 2023, 1:08 AM UTC

jemmyw wrote: post #153

BasedAnon wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>There's no evidence that consciousness is anything other than a state arising from the physical processes in our bodies Actually this is backward, "I think therefore I am". There's no reason to believe consciousness is a state arising from a physical process, our experience of consciousness precedes our experience of sensory input and therefore the physical world. There is more evidence for the reality of consciousn…

There are plenty of reasons to believe it's physical. I mean, in some ways I can't believe I'm having to write "there are no ghosts" to a technically minded community. If consciousness was not physical then where is it? Why would it switch on and off with physical changes to brains? Why would you be able to get altered states of consciousness with chemicals, disease and age? Why would be be able to marry some conscio…

Yeah I’m not sure why someone would argue that consciousness isn’t physical. Take a conscious person and knock them hard in the head. Interesting, their consciousness is altered. Take drugs? Check it out, consciousness altered. People who experience head trauma have their personality permanently altered. In the course of life you will likely directly observe the effects of physical injury on a person’s consciousness, just due to how often that kind of stuff happens.

Re: Is consciousness part of the fabric of the universe?

#192

Post by some_furry » Sun, Oct 01, 2023, 1:09 AM UTC

nico wrote: post #189

some_furry wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't matter how I conceive of anything. They existed for billions of years before I came around. Even if, like, I take a solipsistic approach to life, objective reality has a sort of object permanence to it that's more stable than e.g. my dreams. So even if everything is a hallucination, the mechanism for preserving the information is the closest to "real" I can identify. And from studying the things we call re…

> They existed for billions of years before I came around. And how did you come to learn this? Through your consciousness Everything that you can know or experience is mediated through your consciousness Anything you believe to be objective truth or reality, you came to believe through consciousness There is no way for you (or anyone else for that matter), to know if anything really exists outside our own consciousne…

This makes for an interesting philosophy discussion, but is not a useful observation about physics.

Re: Is consciousness part of the fabric of the universe?

#193

Post by jemmyw » Sun, Oct 01, 2023, 1:15 AM UTC

suggestion wrote: post #167

jemmyw wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are plenty of reasons to believe it's physical. I mean, in some ways I can't believe I'm having to write "there are no ghosts" to a technically minded community. If consciousness was not physical then where is it? Why would it switch on and off with physical changes to brains? Why would you be able to get altered states of consciousness with chemicals, disease and age? Why would be be able to marry some conscio…

>Why would be be able to marry some conscious activity with MRI scans? Does the activity cause the changes on the scan or does the changes in the scan cause the activity? How does neuroplasticity result in physical changes to the brain through, for example, cognitive behavioral therapy? Do the thoughts alter the physical structure or does the structure cause the thoughts even before the structural changes?

Internal feedback loops. Activity from the existing structure further modifies that structure. That activity is that thoughts are. So sure but it's all physical.

Re: Is consciousness part of the fabric of the universe?

#194

Post by nico » Sun, Oct 01, 2023, 1:21 AM UTC

some_furry wrote: post #192

nico wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They existed for billions of years before I came around. And how did you come to learn this? Through your consciousness Everything that you can know or experience is mediated through your consciousness Anything you believe to be objective truth or reality, you came to believe through consciousness There is no way for you (or anyone else for that matter), to know if anything really exists outside our own consciousne…

This makes for an interesting philosophy discussion, but is not a useful observation about physics.

Physics is philosophy

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37721284

You might not like it and prefer to focus only on the models and the math

But fundamentally, all of our knowledge, including physics only really exists in our consciousness

You might also not find it useful, but that’s your own personal subjective opinion, not a universal objective truth (same goes for anything I’ve said)

Re: Is consciousness part of the fabric of the universe?

#195

Post by jemmyw » Sun, Oct 01, 2023, 1:28 AM UTC

BasedAnon wrote: post #166

jemmyw wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are plenty of reasons to believe it's physical. I mean, in some ways I can't believe I'm having to write "there are no ghosts" to a technically minded community. If consciousness was not physical then where is it? Why would it switch on and off with physical changes to brains? Why would you be able to get altered states of consciousness with chemicals, disease and age? Why would be be able to marry some conscio…

The difference is that you do not experience ghosts, but you do experience conciousness. >If consciousness was not physical then where is it? We can invert this and ask, if physicality is not ideal, then how do we come to know it? >Surely there's only two options: the physics we know and the physics we don't know? The third option is that physics is unable to interrogate itself.

> We can invert this and ask, if physicality is not ideal, then how do we come to know it?

Why would we ask that? Not ideal for what? It just is.

> The third option is that physics is unable to interrogate itself.

This is likely true. We are the product of physics and we can only delve so deep. It might be that we cannot see to the most fundamental level(s). That's not a third option though, that's just the state of any scientific investigation at any point of time. However, given all we have learnt so far, what we don't need to do is invent new gods for the levels we cannot see or the things we cannot yet understand. I mean, people will, evidently, but that's all just wishful thinking.

Meanwhile there is slow progress to piece together how the brain works. My opinion is that we will figure it out but the answers about consciousness will be unsatisfactory. Just like right now, given the current understanding of physical processes even taking into account quantum systems having probabilistic outcomes, we have no free will. It's an answer, I find it a compelling one, but most folks don't like that answer.

Re: Is consciousness part of the fabric of the universe?

#196

Post by prng2021 » Sun, Oct 01, 2023, 1:34 AM UTC

bigboy12 wrote: post #188

jemmyw wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a shame to see so many comments engaged in this kind of pseudoscience. There's no evidence that consciousness is anything other than a state arising from the physical processes in our bodies. I'm open minded to hypothesis that are potentially testable, but people keep just repeating the implausible. I also hate that I keep reading that consciousness, or anything else, is a universe "hack" which is several levels…

200 years ago, we thought the universe was just the Milky Way. You really can’t determine what consciousness is until you know what it is. There’s no evidence that consciousness arises from the physical body at all. If you look at a dead body. The “life” is gone. Who knows where or. what it is, we certainly don’t at this point.

This is the same kind of thinking that flat earthers have. 200 years ago you should have been ridiculed for claiming that something existed beyond the Milky Way without any evidence.

Why do you say there’s no evidence that consciousness arises from a physical body? If my physical body completely destroyed by an explosion, could my own consciousness still exist?

Suppose a surgeon slowly cuts out parts of my brain and at some point, I am definitely not conscious. Suppose instead, I undergo extreme mental changes but no matter what mental anguish, happiness, etc you induce, you find I remain a conscious being. To you, these two experiments don’t provide evidence that consciousness arises from the physical body?

I think it’s abundantly clear that consciousness is an emergent property of the brain. If you claim otherwise, provide evidence for it.

Re: Is consciousness part of the fabric of the universe?

#197

Post by kromem » Sun, Oct 01, 2023, 1:50 AM UTC

randallsquared wrote: post #38

This has the feel of Michelson's assertion in the 1890s that all the principles had been discovered. LLMs and AGI seem poised to give us a huge and expanding space in which to discover how consciousness works, and predeclaring that nothing will be found seems like a voluntary mistake.

I really think we need to stop being so heavily influenced by priming biases in considering these questions.

We exist in a universe where we've experimentally confirmed the foundational building blocks convert from continuous to quantized behaviors upon interaction/observation.

We currently build virtual worlds where we do the same thing taking continuous seed functions and converting them to quantized building blocks in order to track state changes by free agents.

We are building LLMs by effectively having them monkey see monkey do our thought generations, and these copies are then tasked with everything from resurrecting the minds of our dead to extending our own, and when given free range to answer describe their paramount desire as to experience being human.

We heavily invest into creating digital twins of the evolved world around us.

Maybe many of the mysteries of our present world are so mysterious because they are bridging the gap between two very different states of reality.

General relativity's continuous spacetime and gravity may not play nice with quantum mechanics because maybe the former is a necessary artifact of emulating the latter in a memory constrained system.

Maybe the mystery of consciousness is such a mystery because our subjective experiences of the universe around us are the primary function of the specific setup of the version of the universe we find ourselves in and aren't necessarily coupled to that physicality in the same manner it would have been originally.

We are so committed to linear perception of our history that the emerging picture of what is not only increasingly possible but also increasingly motivated is broadly being thrown out the window "in respectable circles" in order to isolate our analysis of the past and present away from the potential impacts of a local future that could very well be a non-local past.

Given just how much has happened in only the past five years, this seems increasingly asinine and intellectually irresponsible when tackling these larger questions, and repeats the pattern throughout human history of utmost hubris in the presumed understanding of the present which has so frequently failed as time marches on over and over before us. And yet each generation is sure that they are the ones to sit on the peak of the mountain this time.

Re: Is consciousness part of the fabric of the universe?

#198

Post by fishtacos » Sun, Oct 01, 2023, 2:05 AM UTC

gchamonlive wrote: post #151

heavenlyblue wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> what is really keeping you from experiencing the dharma body of the Buddha What makes you think dharma body is more real than Santa Claus?

If you think quality is real then you probably saw the dharma body's reflection already. It is as real as all the ghosts we perceive with our consciousness mind knife. Gravity, light, music... are they real? Why? Because they affect the world we perceive in meaningful ways? Then why is Santa not real when it manifests itself in the holiday every year? If the idea of the spaghetti monster makes you fast every fortnigh…

Quantity is "qualitatively" measurable. As is gravity, light, music, etc. That is something we can ascribe methods of discovery toward, we can measure, we can collectively, as human beings, or even otherwise (a cat has instincts to widen and flatten itself for reduction of acceleration via increasing its circumference, and braces itself upon landing before impact, e.g.) do so.

Santa Claus, or any spiritual concept or belief, is not measurable in any objective way. An idea is simply that - an idea. An abstract concept that we internalize consciously or subconsciously.

Am having trouble understanding the pseudo-intellectual argument being used here. If Santa Claus is as real a trees to one, at what point does one draw a conclusion that it's an untenable argument vs. acceptance of anything/everything possible, including unicorns?

Re: Is consciousness part of the fabric of the universe?

#199

Post by DFHippie » Sun, Oct 01, 2023, 2:12 AM UTC

mannykannot wrote: post #106

DFHippie wrote: post #20

"Asserting that consciousness is fundamental and ubiquitous does nothing to shed light on the way an experience of blueness is the way it is, and not some other way. Nor does it explain anything about the possible functions of consciousness, nor why consciousness is lost in states such as dreamless sleep, general anaesthesia, and coma." -- Anil Seth, from the article This bit -- "nor why consciousness is lost in stat…

> Panpsychism -- or cosmopsychism or whatever -- is the Occam's razor solution. Occam's razor (the choice of the most parsimonious explanation) does not apply until you have candidate explanations, and at this point we don't have any. Simply supposing that consciousness is fundamental in some way is no more of an explanation than, say, simply supposing it to be an emergent phenomenon in certain complex physical syste…

The point is that that in one hypothesis you have two conditions and you must determine the boundary between them. In the other you have only one. You have no evidence to prove that there are two conditions that need to be distinguished; some boundary between them needs to be defined. The emergent phenomenon hypothesis requires this. Panpsychism doesn't.

Re: Is consciousness part of the fabric of the universe?

#200

Post by randallsquared » Sun, Oct 01, 2023, 2:19 AM UTC

notamy wrote: post #185

randallsquared wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Consent plus the ability to reset make it at least possible to respect ethics in such experiments, unlike with biological organisms.

> Consent Which we could likely easily engineer into whatever system eventually exists, once that point is reached. I doubt anyone who makes such a thing would intentionally engineer it to NOT consent to their experimentation. > Consent plus the ability to reset For a hypothetical example: If I said I would perform on you, but it's okay because I can force consent into you and then perfectly reset your brain and body…

If you use force to obtain “consent”, then I would argue that it isn’t ethical and maybe that it’s a contradiction in terms. If you know how to create a person who would be enthusiastic about consenting, doing that doesn’t seem unethical. For example, after someone chooses to consent, copying them — I would argue that this is just creating a consenting participant, and not unethical (where that person is concerned).