What’s more amazing is why a person is selected as your consciousness?
What’s so hard about understanding consciousness?
241–250 of 393 posts
Re: What’s so hard about understanding consciousness?
#242Earlier quoted context omitted.
> To me, the fact that illusion and hallucination are being invoked is strong evidence of handwaving being engaged in to dismiss an otherwise difficult problem. Dennett doesn't dismiss the difficulty of the problem, he just dismisses that the difficulty is where people think it is. For instance, he would fully agree that the brain is insanely complex and just elaborating how information processing works will be very,…
If one is a "phenomenological zombie", i.e. does not have subjective experience (SE), then Dennett's position is the only one that makes any sense. The only thing to explain, is why others are believing this SE illusion. Those of us who do have SE, and have recognized it, know something the zombies cannot know: that SE must exist.
No, you have a perception that you think entails subjective experience. Surely you would acknowledge the many ways you or others could fool your other perceptions, but it's frankly confusing that you think this simply cannot happen to your perception of subjective awareness. The fact is, if this illusion was adaptive in evolutionary terms, which it arguably is, then you would have developed such an illusory perception.
Re: What’s so hard about understanding consciousness?
#243Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're right, a bacteria would sense and follow chemical gradients and light. And that would be a primitive form of consciousness. A piece of material is not conscious because it doesn't need to. You see, bacterias are self replicators, humans too. And self replication is resource intensive, while resources are limited. So life becomes a competition. That is why agents need to become more attuned to their state and p…
If it's only one protein, is that protein primitively conscious? It's not interacting with anything else to make those decisions, it's completely autonomous. > observing effect, learning from it If something is meaningfully doing that , then we're getting to consciousness. But I'll note that I don't count natural selection as "learning" here. And observing the results of decisions and learning is not mandatory to sur…
Natural selection is the outer loop, reinforcement learning the inner loop. Agents, by living or dying, send signals into the system, guiding the process.
Re: What’s so hard about understanding consciousness?
#244In my experience, when reading about consciousness there are a couple types of claims you should be cautious of: 1) Claims that the causes of consciousness can be easily explained. As far as I can tell, they can't. Usually these explanations use the word "emergent" a lot, and tend to be linguistically impenetrable. Often more poetic than scientific when scrutinized closely. 2) Claims that consciousness doesn't exist.…
I suppose if consciousness is indeed an illusion then that would at least explain why it's so hard to understand. Or rather it may not be that it's hard to understand but understanding an illusion usually means dispelling it, which is problematic when that illusion is consciousness.
Then again claiming something is an illusion is usually less than helpful. Colour is an illusion of sorts (or a qualia if we're being technical), but 'colour is an illusion' is an unhelpful answer to the question 'why is the sky blue?'.
Re: What’s so hard about understanding consciousness?
#245Earlier quoted context omitted.
> But it is not the same question as: how is it possible that we have any experience at all? Let me send this ball straight back to you. In the morning when you wake up what happens? You might take something to eat. How would you find the kitchen, how would you recognise the food, or even know you need it? Of course, you are conscious. That's how. It is possible to be conscious because otherwise your body wouldn't be…
This is an argument that an amobea must be concious, no?
Any self replicator can be. I am not sure about non-replicating agents like some AIs.
Besides having a way to copy what it learns into the future, self replication also provides a goal, a guiding force - of course, the goal is to avoid death before replication. Another great quality of self replication is its open-endedness. It can become anything as long as it keeps replicating.
For these three qualities I consider self replication the basic process behind consciousness. They create the means by which open ended learning can evolve.
Re: What’s so hard about understanding consciousness?
#246It's hard to understand consciousness, but it's not hard to understand why it's hard to understand consciousness. The problem is we are trying to understand consciousness by using consciousness. We can't step outside of it. Just like you can't directly look at your own eyes. You can see them in a mirror, and you can infer properties of consciousness by observing external phenomena, but you can't directly experience it, because you are it (at least from a materialist viewpoint - there are spiritualist traditions that say otherwise).
Re: What’s so hard about understanding consciousness?
#247Earlier quoted context omitted.
If it's only one protein, is that protein primitively conscious? It's not interacting with anything else to make those decisions, it's completely autonomous. > observing effect, learning from it If something is meaningfully doing that , then we're getting to consciousness. But I'll note that I don't count natural selection as "learning" here. And observing the results of decisions and learning is not mandatory to sur…
Natural selection is the outer loop, reinforcement learning the inner loop. Agents, by living or dying, send signals into the system, guiding the process.
Natural selection is not conscious, and agents don't need to have reinforcement.
Re: What’s so hard about understanding consciousness?
#248I do Brazilian Jiu Jitsu and a common submission technique is to cut off blood flow to the brain (known as a blood choke). I've lost consciousness twice after being put into a blood choke. The experience of regaining consciousness is visceral. For those that haven't experienced it, it's very much like a turning on a computer. Initially, your brain does not (or cannot) process input like vision, sound, touch, etc. Slo…
What you just described sounds exactly like waking up from a dream.
Re: What’s so hard about understanding consciousness?
#249In my experience, when reading about consciousness there are a couple types of claims you should be cautious of: 1) Claims that the causes of consciousness can be easily explained. As far as I can tell, they can't. Usually these explanations use the word "emergent" a lot, and tend to be linguistically impenetrable. Often more poetic than scientific when scrutinized closely. 2) Claims that consciousness doesn't exist.…
I suppose if consciousness is indeed an illusion then that would at least explain why it's so hard to understand. Or rather it may not be that it's hard to understand but understanding an illusion usually means dispelling it, which is problematic when that illusion is consciousness. Then again claiming something is an illusion is usually less than helpful. Colour is an illusion of sorts (or a qualia if we're being te…
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Re: What’s so hard about understanding consciousness?
#250In my experience, when reading about consciousness there are a couple types of claims you should be cautious of: 1) Claims that the causes of consciousness can be easily explained. As far as I can tell, they can't. Usually these explanations use the word "emergent" a lot, and tend to be linguistically impenetrable. Often more poetic than scientific when scrutinized closely. 2) Claims that consciousness doesn't exist.…
I suppose if consciousness is indeed an illusion then that would at least explain why it's so hard to understand. Or rather it may not be that it's hard to understand but understanding an illusion usually means dispelling it, which is problematic when that illusion is consciousness. Then again claiming something is an illusion is usually less than helpful. Colour is an illusion of sorts (or a qualia if we're being te…
Consciousness is literally the only thing which can't be an illusion, because it's through consciousness that illusions are perceived in the first place. Cogito ergo sum; you can doubt what you are experiencing as much as you like, maybe it's a dream, maybe it's a simulation, maybe there's an evil demon deceiving you through magical means, but you can't doubt the fact that you are experiencing at all, even doubt itself is part of the experience.