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String theorist Edward Witten says consciousness “will remain a mystery”

blogs.scientificamerican.com

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Re: String theorist Edward Witten says consciousness “will remain a mystery”

#41

Post by espadrine »

brian-armstrong wrote: post #23
golergka wrote: post #11

I 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'm not sure I can buy that it's an illusion. That seems too contrary to my intuition. But it certainly could be something very different than we think. There's still a lot of momentum behind older concepts where you substitute "consciousness" for "soul". For example, you could find out that consciousness is a real phenomenon but that it's experienced by more matter than we think, but without as much depth or ability…

> perhaps each of us has multiple consciousnesses within

You're not far from the truth. Every piece of your brain still alive works roughly as the whole, even when cut off from the rest. Every part of it can make complex decisions (although past a certain size, it's not going to be very smart).

See experiments on a patient with a severed corpus callosum: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zx53Zj7EKQE

Re: String theorist Edward Witten says consciousness “will remain a mystery”

#42

Post by JulianMorrison »

igf wrote: post #39
JulianMorrison wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

You mostly don't self-experience. Mostly you experience what's going on around you, and what you're doing and physically feeling. Mostly, you don't act consciously. But when you direct attention at your own experiencing, or at your own actions in a deliberate way, a subsystem dedicated to that task wakes up and provides you with a homunculus self-model. That would be the 'I'.

Re: String theorist Edward Witten says consciousness “will remain a mystery”

#43

Post by [deleted] »

Angostura wrote: post #29

This reminds me rather of Roger Penrose's foray into consciousness in The Emperor's New Mind. If you wade your way through it, you'll find the tl;dr is 'consciousness must be a quantum thing because quantum things are mysterious and so is consciousness- oh and look at those microtubules in those neurons - you might get quantum effects in there.' Rather disappointing for such a brilliant man.

[deleted]

Re: String theorist Edward Witten says consciousness “will remain a mystery”

#44

Post by geowwy »

Angostura wrote: post #29

This reminds me rather of Roger Penrose's foray into consciousness in The Emperor's New Mind. If you wade your way through it, you'll find the tl;dr is 'consciousness must be a quantum thing because quantum things are mysterious and so is consciousness- oh and look at those microtubules in those neurons - you might get quantum effects in there.' Rather disappointing for such a brilliant man.

Kind of a snide way to dismiss Penrose's work. If our brains are doing things that algorithms can't and QM really is non-deterministic then there could be something to his book. I don't think we know enough to say yet.

Re: String theorist Edward Witten says consciousness “will remain a mystery”

#45

Post by deutronium »

zamalek wrote: post #19
golergka wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In terms of brain, it seems that the classical physics and electromechanics is quite enough — we don't really need to invoke quantum physics to explain the basic neurons (except as by proxy with all chemical reactions), and current progress with neural networks shows that these structures can indeed result in extremely complicated behaviour.

Consciousness must exploit growing entropy somehow - otherwise we'd be completely deterministic and consciousness (as an orthogonal consequence of free will) could not exist.

Does having consciousness mean we can't be completely deterministic?

Re: String theorist Edward Witten says consciousness “will remain a mystery”

#46

Post by zubat »

JulianMorrison wrote: post #32
AReallyGoodName wrote: post #25

Earlier 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…

It's one of the kinds of problem statements that gets habitually distorted by the technology we have to hand. Here we naturally envision it as something that a computational system might represent.

But as soon as we solve some fraction of the problem with scientific means, a small fragment remains to be probed further, still mysterious. Solve that and a yet smaller facet still remains, as in Zeno's paradox. That has been the case with AI, with simulations and physics models and medicine and most fields of study.

Our notion of the authentic is always on fragile ground, and this is most easily seen in music, where technology has enabled total control of the sound on a theoretical level of adding harmonics, but not in the practical sense of "reproduce this sound but make it Better". At the extreme ends it becomes a matter of taste again - why else should vinyl or vacuum tubes or analog filters remain so cherished? As we gain more technology, more of our lives enters this limbo where science can provide deductions that identify and change the measurable, but do not tell us how to pick good measures for ourselves. Philosophizing it is just a matter of continuing to ask those kinds of hard questions and inching forward ever so slightly each time.

Re: String theorist Edward Witten says consciousness “will remain a mystery”

#47

Post by collyw »

JulianMorrison wrote: post #32
AReallyGoodName wrote: post #25

Earlier 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…

Do you have any evidence of this, or is it just your pet theory?

Re: String theorist Edward Witten says consciousness “will remain a mystery”

#48

Post by HONEST_ANNIE »

Witten:

> But I think there probably will remain a level of mystery regarding why the brain is functioning in the ways that we can see it, why it creates consciousness or whatever you want to call it. How it functions in the way a conscious human being functions will become clear. But what it is we are experiencing when we are experiencing consciousness, I see as remaining a mystery...

Understanding the difference between __workings__ and experience of consciousness, the hard problem of consciousness [1], is crucial for understanding what Witten says. Witten says that while science will figure out how mind works in great detail the hard problem of consciousness remains outside science.

It's easy to be sympathetic to Witten. The problem with consciousness seems to be with intuitive meaning of a word and concept.

Imagine that someone builds small programs -- or really small brains in a vat -- that are conscious of color blue, or feel universal love and nothing else. Program's attention and awareness never goes elsewhere and it performs no other cognitive tasks than being conscious in the moment without long term memory. Can you imagine scientists going trough the __workings__ -- code, neuron diagrams or state representations -- of it's mind and going, oh this thing clearly conscious, we can see it now and agree.

There seems to be assumption that the hard problem of consciousness is tied to multiple high level cognitive capabilities. I don't see the connection. The crux of being conscious is having the cognitive ability of aware-consiouns-attentative-reflective at least tiny amount of time. If we could scientifically determine what consciousness is, we should be able to make nice hyper-aware-of-blue-and-knowing-it program and it would be relatively simple one.

[1]: http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Hard_problem_of_consciou...

Re: String theorist Edward Witten says consciousness “will remain a mystery”

#49

Post by zamalek »

deutronium wrote: post #45
zamalek wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Consciousness must exploit growing entropy somehow - otherwise we'd be completely deterministic and consciousness (as an orthogonal consequence of free will) could not exist.

Does having consciousness mean we can't be completely deterministic?

I struggle to determine how we would evolve into that minima without opportunity for free will, without producing a complex solution.

Re: String theorist Edward Witten says consciousness “will remain a mystery”

#50

Post by chriswarbo »

paulofalcao wrote: post #14

If the simulation theory is true, our memory, and all brain activity is done in the simulation (aka real world), but consciousness no. With no consciousness we could have a identical behavior, we would be intelligent zombies. Its cool to think that the world is rendered only when conscious beings see the world ("is the moon there when nobody looks?"). Or... are YOU the only one with consciousness? :)

> all brain activity is done in the simulation (aka real world), but consciousness no.

The simulation hypothesis does not make such dualistic arguments.

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