String theorist Edward Witten says consciousness “will remain a mystery” • Hacker News Board

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

#61

Post by warrenpj » Mon, Aug 22, 2016, 11:30 AM UTC

espadrine wrote: post #35

warrenpj wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> that there is no point of view, just local chemical storage of information.

You have just restated the problem of consciousness, except as an assertion that it doesn't exist.

The problem of reductionism is that it doesn't stop; just as there aren't really points of view, there aren't really any chemicals, and there isn't really such a thing as (classical, let's say) information. All of these things are "just" emergent phenomena.

The explanations which made "aether" and "miasma" obsolete are beautiful, unexpected at the time (in a trivial sense), and of course, not supernatural.

I agree with you about the afterlife. However consider this: if the universe is infinite, isn't it likely that there will be copies of you which arise spontaneously, in all conceivable circumstances? The older you get, the less likely you are to be in a place or time that is causally connected to your birth, because most causal chains involve your death. (This is just a specific case of a Boltzmann Brain[1])

Of course, this sort of nonsense thought experiment runs afoul of the Measure Problem [2]. But this is precisely the kind of problem that I hope the explanation of consciousness would help to resolve.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boltzmann_brain

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Measure_problem_(cosmology)

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

#62

Post by xiler » Mon, Aug 22, 2016, 11:33 AM UTC

adrusi wrote: post #60

xg15 wrote: post #59

Personal opinion: I can imagine that the reason of how we experience consciousness might be unsolvable, much as the question how the color blue feels is hard to answer objectively. However, I think there are a lot less fuzzy questions that are strongly connected with consciousness that I'm hoping can be find answers for - and that could shed some more light on what consciousness is and what it isn't. Such as: - what…

These are all part of the easy problem of consciousness, so yes, I don't think anyone doubts that they can be answered in principle. But there's the hard problem of consciousness, which this article talks about. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousnes...

In particular see the "Mary the super-scientist" thought experiment for a nice explanation of the difference between the two.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_argument

http://philosophyfaculty.ucsd.edu/faculty/rarneson/Courses/F...

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

#63

Post by S4M » Mon, Aug 22, 2016, 11:39 AM UTC

paulofalcao wrote: post #9

The article is based on a video from 2014. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RfwsvSjXkJU

I you want to check the video I'd recommend to skip to approximately minute 13, as the beginning is pretty boring - 1 minute of musical introduction, then the hand of Edward Witten looking in his notes, and then some introduction in what I believe is Dutch.

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

#64

Post by dilemma » Mon, Aug 22, 2016, 11:41 AM UTC

golergka wrote: post #16

meric wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> following the laws of physics The question is, which laws of physics, and are the interaction between those laws of physics, interactions we already know, or new ones we have not discovered yet? Otherwise we might as well say consciousness follows the will of God.

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.

It's the opposite. Neural networks show that the human mind cannot be a recreated computationally.

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

#65

Post by omginternets » Mon, Aug 22, 2016, 11:47 AM UTC

xiler wrote: post #62

adrusi wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These are all part of the easy problem of consciousness, so yes, I don't think anyone doubts that they can be answered in principle. But there's the hard problem of consciousness, which this article talks about. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousnes...

In particular see the "Mary the super-scientist" thought experiment for a nice explanation of the difference between the two. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_argument http://philosophyfaculty.ucsd.edu/faculty/rarneson/Courses/F...

I would also read Daniel Dennett's Consciousness Explained for a counter-point about why "Mary the super-scientist" is based on a faulty premise, and why the Hard/Easy distinction is fallacious.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consciousness_Explained

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

#66

Post by omginternets » Mon, Aug 22, 2016, 11:52 AM UTC

_98fj wrote: post #7

mozumder wrote: post #3

Consciousness is based on a fifth fundamental force in the universe, and certain structures, like DNA, are tuned into that force, like an antenna.

That sounds like something Terence McKenna would have said.

Or Réné Descartes in the 17th century. The fundamental nature of res cogitans so to be conscious... if that rings any bells. :)

It's also an idea that few philosophers of mind agree with at this point. Gilbert Ryle did a pretty good job of showing that the mind-body problem is a pseudo-problem [0].

[0] https://www.amazon.com/Concept-Mind-Gilbert-Ryle/dp/02267329...

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

#67

Post by omginternets » Mon, Aug 22, 2016, 12:11 PM UTC

mozumder wrote: post #3

Consciousness is based on a fifth fundamental force in the universe, and certain structures, like DNA, are tuned into that force, like an antenna.

Are you referring to Cartesian dualism?

Have you read Gilbert Ryle's "The Concept of Mind" (1949) [0]?

This is a very old and tired argument. The form you seem to be endorsing has fallen out of favor in philosophy circles. For an intuitive understanding of why interactionist dualism is a bad explanation of phenomenology, consider the following problems:

- How does your non-physical substance (what you call a fundamental force in the universe) interact with a physical "antenna"?

- Given that this force interacts with matter (as evidenced by consciousness disappearing after certain brain injuries), how is it that it evades physical measure by scientific instruments?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Concept_of_Mind

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

#68

Post by TheOtherHobbes » Mon, Aug 22, 2016, 12:12 PM UTC

JulianMorrison wrote: post #42

igf wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'.

And how do you get from a homunculus self-model to the subjective experience of the colour blue? (Or any other colour?)

...Which would be a subjective experience that seems to have curiously objective elements to it, because colours have been shown to correlate with specific sensations and associations across populations.

And then there's the much deeper question of the extent to which quantum phenomena need an objective observer.

If you think that question is trivial, try to design an experiment which provides objective evidence of change without ultimately relying on the subjective experience of a human experimenter.

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

#69

Post by acqq » Mon, Aug 22, 2016, 12:22 PM UTC

dilemma wrote: post #64

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.

It's the opposite. Neural networks show that the human mind cannot be a recreated computationally.

They don't, as they are many orders of magnitude simpler simpler and many orders of magnitude less parallel than most of the brains.

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

#70

Post by JulianMorrison » Mon, Aug 22, 2016, 12:25 PM UTC

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #68

JulianMorrison wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'.

And how do you get from a homunculus self-model to the subjective experience of the colour blue? (Or any other colour?) ...Which would be a subjective experience that seems to have curiously objective elements to it, because colours have been shown to correlate with specific sensations and associations across populations. And then there's the much deeper question of the extent to which quantum phenomena need an objec…

They're separate, of course. People tend to over-attribute things to their consciousness. Blue is an analysis and categorization being done by the visual processing part of your brain. That part of your brain is grown by basically the same genes as everyone else's. It would be more surprising if it wasn't similar in operation.

Your subjectivity is your brain is you. But only tiny scraps of it are consciously accessible. Nearly all of it just does, it doesn't reflect on the doing. You only notice your visual processing when you force it to glitch or strain with optical illusions and the like.