Consciousness is worth thinking about • Hacker News Board

Re: Consciousness is worth thinking about

#21

Post by lutusp » Sun, Aug 11, 2013, 7:07 PM UTC

guard-of-terra wrote: post #5

lutusp wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Imagine having consciousness having an evolutionary advantage. Because consciousness exists among apparently successful species, it's a reasonable working hypothesis that it has survival value. In evolutionary studies, the burden of evidence is properly borne by those who would argue that an existing, seemingly adaptive trait doesn't have survival value. > First step is to find some creature with nerves but provabl…

We can try to figure out how to create consciousness in something that didn't have it or remove consciousness from some living being, but we can't prove that we have a success before we understand what consciousness is. By the way, if we were find why consciousness has evolutionary advantage we'll have a subset of what consciousness is. A set of traits for which we can test.

> By the way, if we were find why consciousness has evolutionary advantage we'll have a subset of what consciousness is.

Not necessarily. There are plenty of fitness adaptations we can crudely quantify (group A had adaptation X and was more successful as a result) but can't explain (in a rigorous, falsifiable way). The reason is that nature (natural selection) is "smarter" than we are.

Also, the Turing test -- the idea that a sufficiently advanced computer program might pass as human if accessed at a text-only terminal -- tells us that our idea about what counts as a conscious being is pretty limited.

> A set of traits for which we can test.

If we chose a set of traits that we thought identified a conscious person, we could just submit the set to a computer for blind simulation. My point is that consciousness is more complicated than simple behavior, however complex.

It is said that elephants pass the mirror test, meaning when they look in a mirror, they apparently realize they are the source of the reflection. This test has come to be a crude measure of consciousness and self-awareness. But I could easily program a robot to imitate the external behavior, without any real sense of what it was doing, or anything resembling consciousness.

Consciousness is more complex, and more subtle, than most people realize, and we really haven't even begun sorting it out.

Re: Consciousness is worth thinking about

#22

Post by omarchowdhury » Sun, Aug 11, 2013, 7:09 PM UTC

gizmo wrote: post #19

omarchowdhury wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your comment is sophomoric, I'd pick it apart, but I don't see the point. Your comment really isn't up to HN quality standards.

A lot of people check the comments before reading an article. My comment is intended as some sort of public service announcement: don't bother reading the article. I think there's value in that. Of course, if I posted a blog post with the same contents and titled it "Consciousness is worth thinking about: a rebuttal" it would certainly deserve to get flagged.

Your comment doesn't really have any "picking apart". You just pose a few questions and frame the article's author as someone not be taken seriously.

You can't argue against someone simply by saying "what you said is crackpottery".

I found more value in the article than your comment.

Re: Consciousness is worth thinking about

#23

Post by dgallagher » Sun, Aug 11, 2013, 7:10 PM UTC

simonster wrote: post #6

Whether David Chalmers believes that consciousness doesn't come from the brain depends on what you mean by "comes from." He believes that physics can completely describe the physical world; he does not believe in souls and interactionist/Cartesian dualism. Instead, he suggests that information may have both physical and mental manifestations. While I once found this line of reasoning convincing, I'm no longer so sure…

After decades of biological research, we're still not sure what makes an organism alive, in the sense that the line between living organisms and inert biological material is not well-defined, but we know how living organisms reproduce and grow, and that's really what matters.

It might be as simple as "it's alive while it's a functioning machine." A disassembled car is just parts and can't drive/be-alive, but assembled it is a car and can drive/be-alive.

Re: Consciousness is worth thinking about

#24

Post by Tichy » Sun, Aug 11, 2013, 7:10 PM UTC

Consciousness is just an illusion. It is not a useful concept either. It won't help you to program robots, for example.

I was very surprised to learn that according to Less Wrong, the concept of "Zombies" is accepted by a lot of researchers of consciousness: http://lesswrong.com/lw/p7/zombies_zombies/ A zombie here is defined as a person that is exactly like a conscious person, down to every atom, but is not conscious. I think that is complete nonsense.

Re: Consciousness is worth thinking about

#25

Post by Tichy » Sun, Aug 11, 2013, 7:14 PM UTC

dgallagher wrote: post #23

simonster wrote: post #6

Whether David Chalmers believes that consciousness doesn't come from the brain depends on what you mean by "comes from." He believes that physics can completely describe the physical world; he does not believe in souls and interactionist/Cartesian dualism. Instead, he suggests that information may have both physical and mental manifestations. While I once found this line of reasoning convincing, I'm no longer so sure…

After decades of biological research, we're still not sure what makes an organism alive, in the sense that the line between living organisms and inert biological material is not well-defined, but we know how living organisms reproduce and grow, and that's really what matters. It might be as simple as "it's alive while it's a functioning machine." A disassembled car is just parts and can't drive/be-alive, but assemble…

I've come to the conclusion that it is yet another useless question. Or perhaps "it's alive if it interests us". Is the great red spot on Jupiter alive? I don't know, but who cares if it is interesting enough to study? Imagine we finally manage to land on an alien planet, and all we find is robots "living" there. Would we go "ah, too bad, we didn't find life"?

Re: Consciousness is worth thinking about

#26

Post by northwest » Sun, Aug 11, 2013, 7:17 PM UTC

gizmo wrote: post #8

To put it kindly, I'd say this is sophomoric philosophy. The OP suggests that "a more simple and elegant resolution to this paradox is that there is simply one consciousness, and that it alone observes (possibly, decides) these quantum states.". This raises obvious the question: where does that consciousness come from? The author makes no attempt to address that problem. The answer he gives "the UNIVERSE is like ALL…

And:

> Around this same time I became aware of the problem of observation in quantum mechanics. At it’s basic level the issue is that you can affect particles by simply observing them.

That's simply because you can only measure by adding energy to the system, which obviously changes the state of the system.

Re: Consciousness is worth thinking about

#27

Post by mark_l_watson » Sun, Aug 11, 2013, 7:31 PM UTC

Years ago I had a good talk with David Chalmers at a Quantum Mechanics and Consciousness conference. That prompted me to read his book. Roger Penrose and others also have interesting ideas of what is really consciousness.

Most people probably never experience expansive meditation, but for those of us who do that seems like further evidence that consciousness is not all in our physical brains.

Re: Consciousness is worth thinking about

#28

Post by guard-of-terra » Sun, Aug 11, 2013, 7:33 PM UTC

lutusp wrote: post #21

guard-of-terra wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We can try to figure out how to create consciousness in something that didn't have it or remove consciousness from some living being, but we can't prove that we have a success before we understand what consciousness is. By the way, if we were find why consciousness has evolutionary advantage we'll have a subset of what consciousness is. A set of traits for which we can test.

> By the way, if we were find why consciousness has evolutionary advantage we'll have a subset of what consciousness is. Not necessarily. There are plenty of fitness adaptations we can crudely quantify (group A had adaptation X and was more successful as a result) but can't explain (in a rigorous, falsifiable way). The reason is that nature (natural selection) is "smarter" than we are. Also, the Turing test -- the id…

Am I the only one who thinks mirror test is stupid?

You won't realize your recorded voice is yours. You won't realize it's you on a CCTV footage. It's not granted.

On the other hand, it's trivial to make robot pass the mirror test, indeed necessary in the environment where mirrors are common.

Re: Consciousness is worth thinking about

#29

Post by guard-of-terra » Sun, Aug 11, 2013, 7:35 PM UTC

Tichy wrote: post #24

Consciousness is just an illusion. It is not a useful concept either. It won't help you to program robots, for example. I was very surprised to learn that according to Less Wrong, the concept of "Zombies" is accepted by a lot of researchers of consciousness: http://lesswrong.com/lw/p7/zombies_zombies/ A zombie here is defined as a person that is exactly like a conscious person, down to every atom, but is not consciou…

It will help me to understand myself. That's much more important than programming robots. What if I don't actually need any robots in the first place?

Re: Consciousness is worth thinking about

#30

Post by ca98am79 » Sun, Aug 11, 2013, 7:56 PM UTC

gizmo wrote: post #8

To put it kindly, I'd say this is sophomoric philosophy. The OP suggests that "a more simple and elegant resolution to this paradox is that there is simply one consciousness, and that it alone observes (possibly, decides) these quantum states.". This raises obvious the question: where does that consciousness come from? The author makes no attempt to address that problem. The answer he gives "the UNIVERSE is like ALL…

Hi, I am the OP. Thank you for taking the time to read my article and to write a response.

> where does that consciousness come from?

great question! Yes, I make no attempt to address that problem only because the main point of my article was to raise awareness that there is a possibility that consciousness doesn't come from the brain. The important question you bring up is extremely interesting in itself, and I really don't have any idea to the answer. It reminds me of gravity - we have theories about it, but we don't know where it comes from.