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Decades-long bet on consciousness ends

nature.com

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Re: Decades-long bet on consciousness ends

#211

Post by derbOac »

goatlover wrote: post #204
derbOac wrote: post #126

My guess — and this is a guess, not an assertion — is that the hard problem is one of physics and not cognitive science or neuroscience per se.

So panpsychism, property dualism, neutral monism or idealism?

I think what I'm thinking is usually closer to property dualism although I think those positions are similar enough they all make sense to me as possibilities in some form, to the extent I remember them correctly.

I've generally convinced myself at times that consciousness in the hard sense of qualia is probably related to physical information over time, and might reflect potential physical properties of all physical entities.

Re: Decades-long bet on consciousness ends

#212

Post by detourdog »

anotheryou wrote: post #209
detourdog wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't equate consciousness with ethics in any way. I measure consciousness as the ability to accurately understand ones environment. Each level of accurate understanding is distinct. Ethics is a whole other department.

so gpt in the realm of text is in right? only sense it was given (excluding multi modal)

I have no idea. The only thing I know about gpt is what I read on HN. The rest of the comment is also hard to understand.

Re: Decades-long bet on consciousness ends

#213

Post by saurik »

Kim_Bruning wrote: post #76
imtringued wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't just relevant to other people. The question is also 'why does a human form a single consciousness?'. If consciousness emerges purely from information exchange in a complex system, then consciousness would be primarily driven by communication interactions between regions of the human brain and the rest of the body. This in turn means that there should be a way to merge or split consciousnesses. For example,…

If I were to run a single-threaded program on a dual core machine, would it run twice as fast? I'm not suggesting this is a strong analogy, perhaps, but I don't see why putting a high bandwidth link between two brains would necessarily do anything at all. (Actually -since human brains are very adaptable- maybe we would see something happen. But emergence is not something magical. It happens when parts that are made t…

This discussion explicitly started with the assertion that "consciousness is just an emergent phenomenon resulting from any sufficiently powerful cognitive system (either biological or artificial) with sufficient inputs of its environment and, crucially, of itself"; note carefully the word "any", as that's what this downthread discussion has been pushing hard against, and what the thought experiment you are arguing against is itself directed at. You, instead, seem to be very much in agreement and seem to be in alignment with this other side thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36462646

Re: Decades-long bet on consciousness ends

#214

Post by FartyMcFarter »

LocalH wrote: post #139
FartyMcFarter wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> isn't this the equivalent of trying to figure out how an operating system works by trying to look at activity on an encrypted SSD? Not quite - an encrypted SSD is deliberately designed to be hard to understand, while the brain is probably not. It's closer to reverse engineering a very complicated and hacky software system, if you want a tech analogy. > I'm not aware of any philosopher having made meaningful strides…

> Not quite - an encrypted SSD is deliberately designed to be hard to understand, while the brain is probably not Who's to say that the difficulty in understanding how the brain works is a defense mechanism of sorts? Similar to how the blood-brain barrier exists as a defense mechanism. The wording "deliberately" can imply a pedestal that doesn't really exist, that places "deliberate" human design above "natural" micr…

> Who's to say that the difficulty in understanding how the brain works is a defense mechanism of sorts?

I don't see why evolution would have optimised our brains for that specific goal. It's possible but it seems very unlikely, as there's no motivation for it AFAICT.

Re: Decades-long bet on consciousness ends

#215

Post by quus »

scotty79 wrote: post #205
quus wrote: post #178

Im a grad student in philosophy, and this one unfortunately risks perpetuating the annoying myth that philosophers are somehow in competition with the natural sciences — usually believed by people who have literally never taken any courses in philosophy. Quine said that philosophical inquiry is continuous with empirical inquiry, but I think it’d be fine to say that it’s just complementary.

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Re: Decades-long bet on consciousness ends

#216

Post by quus »

mananaysiempre wrote: post #186
quus wrote: post #178

Im a grad student in philosophy, and this one unfortunately risks perpetuating the annoying myth that philosophers are somehow in competition with the natural sciences — usually believed by people who have literally never taken any courses in philosophy. Quine said that philosophical inquiry is continuous with empirical inquiry, but I think it’d be fine to say that it’s just complementary.

My philosophy professor had a multi-volume (non-English-language) textbook called “Introduction to the science of philosophy”, so, uh, I dunno. Claiming it’s complementary is also not benign—it brings along the burden of pointing out some holes in the scientific enterprise, a general conception of how to fill them, and at least some practical success in doing so. I don’t believe that to be impossible and have some th…

I’m not sure what your professor writing some book with a vague title is meant to show. Am I supposed to google this to find the thesis?

Yes, there is a sub area called philosophy of science, and many people in that area are trained in philosophy and science. But I’m unsure why you think philosophers are supposed to be getting empirical facts about physics right ahead of the physicists. That’s not their job.

Re: Decades-long bet on consciousness ends

#217

Post by paxys »

civilized wrote: post #14

Consciousness is not a well-scoped object of scientific investigation. It doesn't have a definition or characterization based on observable things or behavior. If I were a natural scientist, I wouldn't take a bet that I can scientifically explain a phenomenon which I can't even describe in terms of observable things.

The bet essentially was that we would be able to understand and define consciousness based on what we found inside the brain.

Re: Decades-long bet on consciousness ends

#218

Post by paxys »

hnfong wrote: post #63
FartyMcFarter wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> isn't this the equivalent of trying to figure out how an operating system works by trying to look at activity on an encrypted SSD? Not quite - an encrypted SSD is deliberately designed to be hard to understand, while the brain is probably not. It's closer to reverse engineering a very complicated and hacky software system, if you want a tech analogy. > I'm not aware of any philosopher having made meaningful strides…

These days we have a better analogy. It's like trying to figure out how artificial neural networks work by looking at their weights! :D

B can't really be an analogy for A if it is directly derived from A.

Re: Decades-long bet on consciousness ends

#219

Post by bananabiscuit »

Is it possible consciousness will not be ever explained by physical sciences because it is exactly outside of the domain of what science was invented to explain?

Physical science takes on as axioms that the laws of physics are uniform everywhere and that there is no preferred observer. The experience of consciousness is exactly opposite to those two things. It very much is the consequence of you being a preferred observer and experiencing the physics around you in a way that physics assumes no thing can.

Re: Decades-long bet on consciousness ends

#220

Post by paxys »

LocalH wrote: post #139
FartyMcFarter wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> isn't this the equivalent of trying to figure out how an operating system works by trying to look at activity on an encrypted SSD? Not quite - an encrypted SSD is deliberately designed to be hard to understand, while the brain is probably not. It's closer to reverse engineering a very complicated and hacky software system, if you want a tech analogy. > I'm not aware of any philosopher having made meaningful strides…

> Not quite - an encrypted SSD is deliberately designed to be hard to understand, while the brain is probably not Who's to say that the difficulty in understanding how the brain works is a defense mechanism of sorts? Similar to how the blood-brain barrier exists as a defense mechanism. The wording "deliberately" can imply a pedestal that doesn't really exist, that places "deliberate" human design above "natural" micr…

That is incompatible with how evolution works. Complexity is one thing, but there was no survival reason to hide (aka encrypt) the inner workings of a brain when they first came into being ~200 million years ago.
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