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The unending quest to explain consciousness

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Re: The unending quest to explain consciousness

#91

Post by AlexAltea »

paraschopra wrote: post #75

Something that blows my mind: we can use our understanding of physics and math to predict the trajectory of a rocket to the moon without actually going there.. But we can’t predict what new color we’d get by mixing two colors. We just have to mix them to find out.

> But we can’t predict what new color we’d get by mixing two colors.

Can you elaborate more on this point? Links as to why this is impossible would be appreciated. If paint absorbs certain wavelengths while reflecting others (which are the perceived color), wouldn't the mixture of two colors absorb two subsets of the spectrum, and reflect everything else? And if so, why can't it be simulated?

Re: The unending quest to explain consciousness

#92

Post by pjc50 »

adrianN wrote: post #5

The really hard problem of consciousness is giving a definition that allows me to tell whether a rock is more or less conscious than a person.

Then we can apply that definition to all sorts of awkward and upsetting cases like "person in dissociative state", "person with plural-psyche", "person in persistent vegetative state", "newborn baby", etc.

Or even currently on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21720761 - revivals of ""dead"" people are gradually getting better.

Re: The unending quest to explain consciousness

#94

Post by SmellyGeekBoy »

taneq wrote: post #82
tim333 wrote: post #11

An interesting thing to me is the unending quest may somewhat end during our lifetimes through us being able to build conscious AI and see how it works.

We'll never build conscious AI, purely because we'll never admit that "a mere computer" is conscious. I think we're more likely to inadvertently prove that qualia don't really exist in us any more than they do in computers.

The invention of conscious AI could spawn a whole civil rights movement. Is a computer capable of consciousness entitled to the same rights as a human?

Obviously this has already been pondered in depth by various sci-fi writers over the years, but it will be very interesting to see if it does happen in our lifetimes.

Re: The unending quest to explain consciousness

#95

Post by SmellyGeekBoy »

erokar wrote: post #69
tim333 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well if you Google "conscious", the dictionary definition starts: "aware of and responding to one's surroundings" I'd suggest self driving cars do that better than radiators.

This topic deserves a little more than a dictionary definition. There's no reason to believe self-driving cars has any more of a subjective experience, qualia, than radiators.

There's also no reason to believe that our own "consciousness" is any more than a significantly advanced algorithm. It's a very human trait to put ourselves on a pedestal.

Re: The unending quest to explain consciousness

#96

Post by SmellyGeekBoy »

philip142au wrote: post #43

I suspect it doesn't exist, we wish it exists, otherwise we are machines.

I'm not sure why you've been downvoted for this. The fact that our consciousness is nothing more than the emergent behaviour of various ongoing chemical and electrical processes doesn't sit well with some people, I guess. Personally I derive a lot of comfort from the fact that we aren't "special".

Re: The unending quest to explain consciousness

#97

Post by Pimpus »

It is indeed unending, no end in sight. This should signal that there is something fundamentally wrong with Western thinking that leaves it incapable to even begin to grapple with the question.

Some "reputable" philosophers even deny that consciousness exists.

Anyway, here is the answer. 3 minutes and you can move on and think about more productive things.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=9n6NvDpcwLM

Re: The unending quest to explain consciousness

#98

Post by corporate_shi11 »

The closest we will ever come to describing consciousness is simply describing the correlates of consciousness. The "ultimate cause" of it will forever be a mystery, behind the veil.

Consciousness appears to exist outside of the physical world, in that we can describe a physical process entirely without invoking consciousness. Because of this, consciousness is beyond the scientific method and our fundamental understanding in principle, not just in practice.

This is why it is called the "hard problem" of consciousness. In principle, there is no framework of deduction or reasoning by which we can explain the emergence of qualia.

It is beyond us.

Re: The unending quest to explain consciousness

#99

Post by BlueTemplar »

incompatible wrote: post #85
mellosouls wrote: post #78

My personal preference is for panexperientialism (essentially a bare bones panpsychism), with the idea that the phenomenon is somehow connected with change, and belongs to anything capable of change in some way and is probably a fundamental property of nature, as fundamental as space or time. It's important to divorce consciousness from all ideas of "thought", "will" etc. to consider it's essence which is more connec…

Probably because consciousness requires some kind of underlying mental processes, which take time to achieve. I can only guess that it's similar to an instance of a computer program such as a web browser, i.e., it isn't a "thing" itself but is built out of a multitude of underlying calculations on a physical computer. This also implies to me that consciousness, not being a physical thing itself, comes and goes within…

= emergent ?
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