We understand consciousness perfectly, being conscious beings an all. It's the physical world that doesn't make any sense.
String theorist Edward Witten says consciousness “will remain a mystery”
31–40 of 82 posts
Re: String theorist Edward Witten says consciousness “will remain a mystery”
#32See, if a neuroscientist went and had an opinion on sub-atomic physics, people would say "that's nice" and pat them on the head in a patronizing way. But the problem is general. A scientist outside their field is a layman .
Is a neuroscientist more qualified than a physicist on this particular topic? Personally I'd leave it to the philosophy guys since we're that far from any understanding of it.
If I was to give my unqualified, layperson opinion, I'd say "horse feathers". Consciousness probably isn't "hard" at all. It's a massively parallel brain architecture (which by its widely-spread and slow nature can't accurately self monitor) using theory-of-mind circuitry (developed to handle interpersonal social relations) to model and monitor its own operation.
But it feels more sparkly and special to treat it as a mystery.
Re: String theorist Edward Witten says consciousness “will remain a mystery”
#33In my experience all those "consciousness is otherworldly magic" people are at least heavily influenced (1) by the religious interpretation of the "magical uniqueness" of the humans compared to the all other living beings. Wishful thinking. Then comes the "free will" and other also "magical" thinking. Especially easy to sell in the US (2)
And we aren't made of anything other than what all the animals are made of, and the underlying processes in our brains aren't physically unique. And there's no "spirit" or "soul" needed to explain anything.
The word spirit comes from Latin spiritus "breath." Ditto for the term for soul "psyche" which comes from the ancient Greek psykhe with the original meaning "breath." That's all that "leaves us" when we die (as we "have our last breath") and from where all the magical thinking came.
The consciousness is just a product of evolution, and "a kind of self awareness" exists by animals too. Not much different from what we observe by ourselves, and actually of direct evolutionary advantage.
More about all that:
http://www.vice.com/read/sorry-religions-human-consciousness...
http://www.livescience.com/26338-crabs-feel-pain.html
http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2016/01/free-will-is-dead-l...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Demon-Haunted_World
---
1) if themselves not explicitly declared believers or at least philosophers, the latter having all the incentives to mystify the topic and stay away from the hard sciences
2) 4 of 10 in the US believe "that God created humans in their present form 10,000 years ago: http://www.gallup.com/poll/170822/believe-creationist-view-h...
Re: String theorist Edward Witten says consciousness “will remain a mystery”
#34See, if a neuroscientist went and had an opinion on sub-atomic physics, people would say "that's nice" and pat them on the head in a patronizing way. But the problem is general. A scientist outside their field is a layman .
And a journalists' views on string theory :-/
"Just because Witten is a genius does not mean he is infallible. He is wrong, I believe, that string theory will eventually be validated,..."
Re: String theorist Edward Witten says consciousness “will remain a mystery”
#35I have no evidence or proof, but personally, I believe that the whole consciousness thing is an illusion. There's certain level of abstraction required for a bran as advanced as human's, but in the end, it's just matter following the laws of physics, same as everything else.
The problem with this language is that the very word "illusion" implies an observer. To whom is it an illusion? And, what are the properties of this illusion? Can we make artificial minds that are also suffering from the same illusion? The very fact that there is (let's suppose) such an illusion requires an explanation. Suppose the brain has somewhere encoded the idea of consciousness, but no "actual" consciousness.…
> Of course the real explanation of consciousness will be both profound and mundane
The expectation of something does not guarantee its existence. Words are created to define the expectation of something unexplained, only to be discarded when the expectation is unmet.
Take the word "miasma". At some point in history, a belief was born that all diseases came from gaseous poisons emitted by rot. Then the miasma theory got definitely discarded when we got the ability to view germs, which are simply distant cousins. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miasma_theory
Take the word "aether". Since waves on the sea were carried by water and sound waves by air, it was assumed that interplanetary space was filled with a substance that light (assumed to be just a wave back then) was carried through. It was called aether. It turns out the real explanation of aether is not profound nor mundane: there is nothing, and that nothing expands. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aether_theories
I don't really understand why it is hard to accept that there is no after-life, that all our activities are the sole result of chemical transmission of signals in our brains... that there is no point of view, just local chemical storage of information.
But it was hard for our ancestors to fathom that humans were part of a phylogenetic tree encompassing all Earth life forms, that we as a species were not special. It was hard for them to fathom that space is relative, that there is no center. I suppose it is always hard to accept that there is no reference point in the universe.
Re: String theorist Edward Witten says consciousness “will remain a mystery”
#36See, if a neuroscientist went and had an opinion on sub-atomic physics, people would say "that's nice" and pat them on the head in a patronizing way. But the problem is general. A scientist outside their field is a layman .
Is a neuroscientist more qualified than a physicist on this particular topic? Personally I'd leave it to the philosophy guys since we're that far from any understanding of it.
Are you a neuroscientist?
Re: String theorist Edward Witten says consciousness “will remain a mystery”
#37It may be a mystery for some time, but I suspect we'll figure it out eventually. Given the rapid pace medical science understanding has gone through in the last several hundred years, it seems likely.
Re: String theorist Edward Witten says consciousness “will remain a mystery”
#38I have no evidence or proof, but personally, I believe that the whole consciousness thing is an illusion. There's certain level of abstraction required for a bran as advanced as human's, but in the end, it's just matter following the laws of physics, same as everything else.
I've read a critique of this approach, which critiques the basis of this assumption - "laws of physics". It goes like, that living systems does not follow laws of physics completely, but rather, as time progresses, establish new laws. And we have the word Emergence now. New laws emerge from within the interactions of the system, they are not posed apriori.
Would be happy if someone more knowledgeable could elaborate.
Re: String theorist Edward Witten says consciousness “will remain a mystery”
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is a neuroscientist more qualified than a physicist on this particular topic? Personally I'd leave it to the philosophy guys since we're that far from any understanding of it.
If I was to give my unqualified, layperson opinion, I'd say "horse feathers". Consciousness probably isn't "hard" at all. It's a massively parallel brain architecture (which by its widely-spread and slow nature can't accurately self monitor) using theory-of-mind circuitry (developed to handle interpersonal social relations) to model and monitor its own operation. But it feels more sparkly and special to treat it as a…
Okay, fine, but why am I in here experiencing it?
Re: String theorist Edward Witten says consciousness “will remain a mystery”
#40A very good book about what we currently (minus 3 years, perhaps) know:
https://www.amazon.com/Consciousness-Brain-Deciphering-Codes...