actually the paper turns away from IIT - the latter part of section 5 decides that “the electrical and magnetic fields within and around the sun seem a more promising starting point for a discussion of solar consciousness than IIT in its present forms”
> self-organizing systems at all levels of complexity, including stars and galaxies, might have experience, awareness, or consciousness.
It must be terrifying if you're a galactic entity and have experience, awareness, and consciousness, but no autonomy w.r.t. movement, trapped in a trillion-year path that you cannot escape.
Without the concept of free will in humans, which many now accept as a possibility, what would be the fundamental difference between an entity such as the sun, a plant and a human? None, except the lifespan.
I think the point is a bit more interesting than that. If you instead suppose we don't have free will, and there is no indefinable quality, then suddenly it’s not anymore scary to be a conscious galaxy than it is to be a human.
Right, but you're supposing away the entire essence of the discussion. If you take for granted we have no free will, our indistinguishability from anything else in the universe is an immediately obvious logical consequence.
I don't think that was implied, but rather the sun does, what the sun does and we do, what we do. If we do not have free will, but every action, every thought is a determined reaction of the state of things, than we would also be "trapped". But we do not (normally) perceive it as such. We experience our lives and we live it. We act. Even though our actions might come from a deep automatism. For the sun it might be the same, just on a whole different level.
> It must be terrifying if you're a galactic entity and have experience, awareness, and consciousness, but no autonomy w.r.t. movement, trapped in a trillion-year path that you cannot escape.
Surely such an entity would not see itself being trapped at all, any more than a tree does. It is what it is.
On the contrary, it probably pities humans, asteroids, comets, moons, planets, and everything and anything else that is smaller, younger, with a shorter lifespan, or less energetic.
You would never have known anything else. If you realized you were self-aware, say, sometime around reaching hydrostatic equilibrium, what would you even compare the experience to? Would the very concept of autonomy have any meaning to you? As a solipsistic consciousness, would you have an ontology into which to place such a concept?
(Apologies for the Socratic barrage, but this line of inquiry triggered my inner first-year philosophy student.)
I get that it would understand mortality and all. What I mean is, terror is a very specific, mammalian response to a perceived threat. There are unimaginably more possible responses to that realization than terror. Terror makes sense for immediate, fleeting threats, but I doubt a galactic scale awareness would develop that specific mechanism.
Because you perceive the galaxy as being on a railroad? Why? Doesn’t Stan look railroaded the way he drives to work, eats lunch, drives home, mows the lawn? Maybe the galaxy, like us,[1] experiences itself as doing things with volition. Which might seem weird given the sheer scale and timespan of a galaxy. But:
> Assuming that the galactic mind works in and through electromagnetic fields, then its thoughts and perceptions must be very slow
indeed, by our standards. The radius of the Milky Way is about 50,000
light years, so it would take at least this length of time for the galactic
centre to perceive what is happening at the periphery, and as long
again for it to act on star systems at the edge.
Instead of having a consciousness that has to wait 50,000 years for some input, it makes more sense for a consciousness to experience time on a scale where input happen in (say) 100ms consciouss-perceived time or so. So what looks like 500,000 years for us is a second to a galaxy.
[1] The HN philosophers can argue about free will or not but here only the feeling of having it is relevant
Maybe a better question would be something similar to the following:
Is a Self-Organizing System -- Conscious?
Or perhaps an even better question (for research) might be something as follows:
If some Self-Organizing Systems are conscious and some are not -- then which are and why, and which are not -- and why not?
?
Also:
Is a Self-Organizing System -- the definition of Consciousness, or is Consciousness the definition of a Self-Organizing System?
That is, could one term be used to substitute the other with equal clarity, or are there differences, and if so, what, precisely?
Is a Self-Organizing System a superset of Consciousness, or is Consciousness a superset of a Self-Organizing System?
You know, the superset/subset relationship... if A is a superset of B, then B is a subset of A...
Or vice-versa, as the case may be...
Anyway, I think it's interesting that the concept of "Self-Organizing System" occurs with relatively high frequency and adjacency to the concept of "Consciousness".
Perhaps they will ultimately be proven to be the same thing, the same underlying phenomena...
And then again, perhaps not...
Whatever the case, I'm sure there will be some interesting and lively discussions about the subject in the future! :-) <g> :-)
> Alfred Rupert Sheldrake (born 28 June 1942) is an English author and parapsychology researcher. He proposed the concept of morphic resonance,[2][3] a conjecture that lacks mainstream acceptance and has been widely criticized as pseudoscience.
Being a kook and holding degrees in science are not mutually exclusive. His theories are intriguing nonsense in the sense that they have little to no evidence to support them. Their deeply conjectural nature is what defines them as kooky.
I've seen him give a talk. He continues to persist with pseudo-scientific theories that posit forces for which there are no evidence that purport to explain phenomenon that we have completely adequate scientific explanations for. His theories routinely fail Occam's razor, his experimental design is garbage, and he is never skeptical of his own conclusions. He's a kook.
He's a trained biochemist. Doesn't make him an expert on consciousness, psychology, cosmology, or any of the other things his crazy theories are about.
I've engaged with his ideas in depth, mostly because I find crackpot science interesting even if I don't buy it. There's nothing there. Morphic resonance is a non-theory. It's so vague as to easily be morphed to explain any counterargument, it's not falsifiable and it's not supported by any evidence other than the evidence he wilfully misinterprets as supporting his theory.
Sheldrake is very intelligent. But something happened to him in the late 60s that caused him to abandon his biochem research and go into increasingly kooky stuff.
If it was in the late '60s and he got into parapsychology and wondering if the sun is conscious, that's a very big hint of what "happened" to him. That generation is probably still pissing off all the drugs it took to roll back that high and beautiful wave [1].
This is not just a glib comment btw. I have some history with that kind of thing. When I was just small I discovered my mother's library, that happened to be full of New Age books that were popular with her and her friends as she was growing up, I guess: yoga, reiki, orientalism, astrology, Arthur Koestler, Wilhelm Reich, Aldus Huxley and Carlos Castaneda... I am a voracious reader, and I read them voraciously. I had the luxury of reading them in an age that was too young for the psychedelic drugs praised by some of them (Huxley and Castaneda, mainly, who were also the best writers of the bunch) and so managed to read them critically, I guess, and recognise their deep flaws [2]. I can imagine how hard it would have been to think critically if I had read those books under the influence of the kind of drugs people took in the '60s.
And later. Growing up I had a friend who would regularly smoke hash and sit down and read the bible. He was at least half mad. A dear friend, but half mad. Drugs aren't good for criticial thinking.
I think our man, Sheldrake, he fried his brain on drugs and that's how he can now think that the sun might be conscious, and that people can tell when someone's staring at them. I have another friend who smokes a lot of hash and is at least half mad and he's a big fan of Sheldrake. This friend is convinced that people can hear his thoughts. I think he believes he's telepathic and he is inadvertently projecting his thoughts into peoples' heads.
Sometimes I think of all the people I know who go about their lives with their heads full of beliefs that never need touch reality, and it weirds me out a bit. Think of how many people believe in gods, or in aliens, or in reincarnation. I cross paths with those people everyday, we occupy the same physical space, but they live in a different world that I can't see or feel. That a guy trained in biochemistry (and who probably was a bit too friendly with chemistry for his own good) has made a whole world model out of nothing more than his imagination is not a big surprise.
[2] Take astrology, for instance. My mother had a 13-tome opus, with one tome on each sign, plus one for the general stuff. I read my own sign's tome first and I was inspired: everything in there described me so perfectly! Then I read the tome for another sign; and that, too, described me perfectly. So did the next, and the next. Soon I realised that the "perfect descriptions" of my personality were doing nothing more than flattering me, for having aspects to my personality that basically everyone has. They were just trying to get me hooked by telling me how cool I really am, because I'm an X sign.
They're not, the author of the books was certainly good at her job and the profiles of each sign were very different, not possible to automatically generate from a template. But, see, I can tell you how down to earth you are, or how fierce and loyal you are, or how aloof and artistic you are, or how your enemies should fear your terrible vengeance, and while those are all different traits they can all make you feel good about yourself, without even being necessarily positive traits and not even being strong traits of your personality, just by making it all a big deal and making it all about you. That's what those books sell, they unconditionally flatter the insignificant. It's like having a choir following you around and singing Carmina Burana every time you pick your nose.
Also the extra books helped me understand the whole, which I would have missed if I had only read one, so that makes the otherwise wasted money worth it.
I haven't read Castaneda since I was in high school. I wonder how different I would feel about those books if I read them now. What would you say the deep flaws of that series were?
If you read them as fantasy horror books they are some of the best I have ever read, just for the originality and the detail of the world-building. They are basically free of fantasy fiction tropes and instead borrow heavily from oriental mysticism and, it seems to me, computer science (in the books, reality itself is a great flow of information). For me, they're up there with Lovecraft's work.
Their flaw was that the guy who wrote them was an honest-to-god cult leader, who didn't mean the books as fantasy tales but as recruiting tools for his New Age cult. Ultimately, he indirectly caused the death of at least one of his closest followers, and possibly three more [1].
The first book was also basically an instance of academic fraud: "The teachings of Don Juan" was first published as a work of real anthropological research into the mystical practices of Yaqui Indians, but it had nothing to do with them and in any case it was not the result of field work as it was presented. In later books Castaneda clearly tries to retcon this by pointing out that Don Juan's tradition is unique and separate from Yaqui shamanic beliefs. One of his followers, Florinda Donner, also published a made-up anthropology book [2], btw.
After finding all this out it would be really hard for me to read the books today and enjoy them.
Maybe that's overreacting. I've been way more relaxed about the lives of other authors I read; like Lovecraft, for example. I was once called a fascist because I said that Starship Troopers is one of my favourite Sci Fi books. I ignored Heinlein's politics and I only read it as fiction and I still think it's clearly just fiction. The guy who called me a fascist, btw, is a Warhammer 40K player with a Grey Wolves army. Hmph.
Just what exactly is sound about positing "magic fields" that have shoddy experimental evidence[1], predict nothing (or if they do, predict obvious things which we have completely adequate explanations for), and are totally unfalsifiable?
[1] Like his kooky "dogs know when owners are coming home" experiment (https://www.sheldrake.org/books-by-rupert-sheldrake/dogs-tha...). Like somehow dogs getting increasingly agitated the longer their owners are away is fucking mysterious to him. Also, apparently dogs cannot hear or smell, tell time, or remember patterns of behavior...at all. Such a kook.
Apologies if this is a dumb question or a taboo question or both, but what the does “conscious” mean?
We know about lots of complex systems, and systems that exhibit “emergent” behaviors seeming much more complex and goal-directed than the components of the system (the glider gun, that thing with the computer-modeled birds with like 3 simple rules but then the whole flock does complicated, creative stuff, long list).
Because I don’t think I’ve ever heard someone call a virus conscious, or a fire (until this submission I guess) and both of those things consume energy in one way or another, reproduce, avoid obstacles, adapt to situations to reproduce more.
Ok so maybe it’s bacteria, or maybe it’s spiders, or maybe it’s dolphins, or maybe it’s primates, and then abruptly it’s “yup, humans for sure, that’s the one thing everyone agrees on, humans are conscious”.
But is a fertilized human egg conscious, or a fetus at one trimester, or two, or three, or birth? That seems pretty controversial.
Doesn’t this all seem a bit pre-Copernican? It’s like the “Copenhagen Interpretation” of wave function “collapse” via Born amplitudes: if you just give up on trying to force subjective human experience onto hard data and sound math, abruptly there’s nothing really very controversial going on other than some deep, personal introspection about subjective experience.
I regard myself as a spiritual person in the sense that I wonder about my own subjective experience and the existence of some greater plane of reality and the possibility of a creator or deity, that seems to be a fairly common if not borderline ubiquitous thing people describe, but it’s not transferable, and it feels like the goalposts on consciousness are just a bunch of post-facto efforts to rationalize why this observable trait of other people likewise describing some subjective experience into science.
If describing a subjective experience in compelling natural language is an indicator of consciousness then my MacBook is conscious.
Panpsychist here, much of the time at least. It sort of sneaked up on me.
It was initially a physics inquiry. I was playing with the idea that there is not "the" arrow of time, but instead "my" arrow of time, something arising from my biochemistry maybe.
Under this lens, the obvious candidates for consciousness are the ones whose arrows of time are all pointing in the same direction--because I can communicate with them (this is why most humans believe that humans are conscious).
The things that seem not to be conscious: lightning strikes, rocks, etc. these may just be the machinations of someone whose arrow of time is orthogonal to my own. Their future is my... left, or whatever (btw if you think this is a fun concept, you might enjoy the book "A Clockwork Rocket," which is about time and space, not consciousness).
I have no evidence that these things in fact are conscious, but I also have no evidence that they are not. But it's not just academic, I'll behave differently depending on how I chose:
- On the one hand you've got kooky behavior like listening to a waterfall and wondering what it's thinking.
- On the other hand you've got this loneliness and the idea that it can be solved with rocket ships or telescopes and the possibility that you'll overlook life right under your nose because you're too busy looking for something that looks like yourself.
> I was playing with the idea that there is not "the" arrow of time, but instead "my" arrow of time, something arising from my biochemistry maybe.
> Under this lens, the obvious candidates for consciousness are the ones whose arrows of time are all pointing in the same direction--because I can communicate with them (this is why most humans believe that humans are conscious).
None of this follows for me. If a being has its own arrow of time surely it would be based on decisions it would make, and conscious beings would not all have their time arrows pointed in the same direction simply because they were conscious.
Sorry, what I mean is that if you and some other being happen to have parallel time arrows, then it's possible that you'll recognize them as conscious. They might have similar thermodynamic properties to yourself, for instance. If you prod at them, they squeal afterwards. That sort of thing.
If you encounter one with an orthogonal time arrow, you're not going to be able to communicate with them. You're not going to have evidence that can identify them as separate from any other phenomena. This unknowability turns it into a choice, not a deduction.
From there you've got to decide whether you'd rather assume something is conscious when it's not, or whether you'd rather assume something's not when it is. I find the latter more troubling.
I only took one semester of thermodynamics, but I think what I'm after is indeed an arrow of time.
I experience reality in such a way that certain processes are irreversible. Eggs do not uncook, they only cook, that sort of thing. That's my arrow of time.
Conventional physics calls it "the" arrow of time. Much like how we used to call Earth "the" center of the universe. It feels like the kind of thing that we've gotten wrong before. Like maybe it says more about us than it says about eggs.
Could there be a process that is heading the opposite direction? A perspective for which eggs uncooking is the normal state of affairs? Who am I to shut the door on a possibility like that?
It's the kind of thought experiment that leads to theory creation: What if all events, and not just the small ones of particle physics, are symmetry-preserving? What might we have to change about our concept of energy to make that fit?
I really don't think so, getting the arrow of time to go a different way requires more than entropy locally decreasing, despite various popular descriptions. In most current theories of cosmology it should only go one way. Obviously there's general and special relativity, but they still have time going in the same direction, just at "different speeds", if you want to call it that.
Edit: remember, we don't live in "The Clockwork Rocket", our GR uses the Lorentzian manifold, not a Riemannian manifold.
You're right of course. I'm not trying to argue for this toy theory of mine to be considered as an alternative to the physics we've worked so hard to achieve.
I tried that many years ago, it didn't work out. But that's ok, it was more about the journey anyhow.
My point is just that I had to get sufficiently "out there" in order to have panpsychism show up organically, but now that I have, it's a pretty comfortable perspective.
I thought I'd share because most people seem a bit repulsed by it, which is a shame because it's fun.
Curvature isn't necessary here; all we need is time-orientability, so we can even be more general than a Lorentzian manifold. We can achieve time-orientability by comparing how strictly we must constrain the degrees of freedom of, for example, an adiabatically expanding or contracting cloud of gas of non-interacting test particles below some critical mass-density such that expansion will carry on forever, rather than there being some eventual recontraction. This is perfectly doable in flat spacetime. It's essentially just a problem in statistical mechanics, as we can arrange time-orientability this way without having anything to do with relativity.
We don't really need time-orientability in relativity; it is perfectly reasonable to have solutions to the field equations which are static or stable periodic (and thus there is no clear past/future). Conversely, more generally we can get time-orientability in a wide variety of dimensions other than 3+1.
Relativity just tells us that where there is some global time-orientable feature, every observer will agree what's the past and what's the future of that feature. However, complex observers may have some internal degrees of freedom providing a local notion of time-orientability which could be unaligned with the global feature (and other observers' local features).
I don't see how any of this can relate to "consciousness" though. Also, our universe really doesn't admit backwards time travellers as far as we can tell, so whether and how the wider universe "corrects" observers who have different past/future orientations is really really really academic from a physics perspective. Sean Carroll's blog had a lot about that a decade or more ago, which you can probably dig out of preposterousuniverse.com or wherever.
You've hit on the root of the debate, but you might have missed it. The debate is to define the meaning of consciousness.
We've got a general problem of not knowing what consciousness is, if it actually exists, how many people have it, if it is exclusive to humans and not really having a good philosophical grounding for (assuming multiple separate consciousnesses could exist) whether in practice that is the case of if the universe only have one big super-contagiousness that happens to be well partitioned. Also what is the nature of time as a bonus, because that one is quite gnarly and has lots of implications for the other questions - there arer lots of things about time that could be true but we would be unable to perceive.
Once you have answered all those questions to taste, you are now prepared to engage in unending argument with people who picked any alternate combination of answers.
Is there some particular reason why this debate isn’t squarely in the spiritual/religious/personal/subjective building on campus and zero in the science building?
I mean, these are all fascinating questions in a “let’s smoke a joint and talk about the meaning of life” sense, I’ve had many such conversations (both with and without the joint) and enjoyed all of them that were of that tenor.
And I can see there being a building on campus between the other two where the topic is ethics and morality: how rigorous can we be about what constitutes acceptable behavior, compassionate behavior, empathetic behavior, kindness and decency. Those things seem much more amenable to some level of rigor: I certainly hope that some version of those ideas can be rigorous enough to admit a consensus, but that seems like a way more realistic goal than defining consciousness. It still poses hard questions: is it ok to eat animals? That’s controversial but seems at least in principle amenable to scientific study of apparent pain or suffering and strategies for minimizing or eliminating it entirely.
I have a sinking suspicion that the real definition of “conscious” is “seems a lot like me”.
You might be being facetious, but just in case - academic philosophers generally aren't in the business of smoking joints while talking about the meaning of life, or anything like this (even without the joint). They're generally focused on making principled arguments for views, including views on consciousness.
And the debate is primarily a philosophical debate, not a scientific debate, if that's what you're asking.
And I'm not sure that ethics is particularly more "scientific" than philosophy of mind. There's a case to be made that scientific study of pain is relevant to the morality of eating animals, yes, but there's also a case to be made that science is relevant to consciousness, e.g. the science related to IIT. And in both cases, the science is relevant but doesn't even come close to solving the issue.
Science generally maintains silence in these sort of discussion in my experience, there isn't a lot it has to say and I don't think any of the facts are controversial. There aren't really any questions here about observable phenomenon. But scientists also enjoy philosophy and it is an easy topic to have an opinion on. And arguing is fun for its own sake, although some people seem to be motivated by fear of their perception of reality being challenged.
I'm not sure if you're dunking on "spiritual/religious/personal/subjective" stuff, but the hard question of consciousness is, in some ways, the most important question of all. Far more important than "science" questions like "what is dark matter?"
Literally our entire civilization is built on the idea that humans have qualia and therefore causing harm to humans is often unethical. If we were to somehow come to believe that consciousness is just an illusion--no more than a biochemical phenomenon, and no more special than transistor switching--then we would usher in a dystopia in which any horror inflicted on people is potentially justifiable and even necessary.
The rise of LLMs is forcing us to confront this head-on. LLMs can't be conscious--they are literally just matrix multiplication. But if LLMs can act like humans and not be conscious, then maybe humans aren't really conscious either.
> But if LLMs can act like humans and not be conscious, then maybe humans aren't really conscious either.
Isn't this like saying "if the man in the Chinese room can act like he understands Chinese and not understand Chinese, then maybe nobody understands Chinese."?
Yes. And that is one of the reasons why Chinese room thought experiment is interesting.
We know how a Chinese-understanding human would respond -- they respond exactly like the room does -- but we don't know if he actually understanding anything.
If you understood Chinese, you probably wouldn't have any doubt about whether you understood Chinese or not. And it seems incredibly strange to think that only you understand Chinese and nobody else does.
Why does ethics need to be based on consciousness anyway? Can't you just stipulate your baseline requirements and then enforce them by any means necessary? Are the aesthetics not "cosmopolitan" enough?
>>> If we were to somehow come to believe that consciousness is just an illusion--no more than a biochemical phenomenon, and no more special than transistor switching.
I believe this and yet I personally seek to inflict as little horror as possible, and am moderately restrained in the amount of force I believe the state should use.
> Literally our entire civilization is built on the idea that humans have qualia and therefore causing harm to humans is often unethical.
Here's an alternative angle that doesn't lead to dystopia:
Humans generate knowledge. Causing harm to knowledge is unethical. Broad human rights protect humans as knowledge generators (now or in the future or in potential) without going through the fraught process of arguing about each one.
Consciousness and qualia don't have to come into it.
Knowledge is too broad a concept to protect all of it. Taking it to the extreme would probably mean that all output of /dev/random should be treasured in multiple backups, to avoid any bits to die.
Not at all. If you had rejected the pretty much random processes in the primordial soup that eventually led to life (and then knowledge) from the start, then where would we be?
I think that it is almost impossible to determine randomness in an ongoing process.
Biological life itself embodies some knowledge. It uses trial-and-error evolution instead of thinking, but it arrives at solutions. Sometimes it arrives at the same solutions from different directions. This is different from randomness and the arbitrary results of random processes.
Do our best? That's all we ever do when it comes to morals anyway. And I'm intentionally implying that we already value and protect knowledge, under a variety of different names.
Having said that, I don't really believe in one moral value to rule them all, I just think knowledge is a big one and useful for cutting through gordian knots.
It tends to return to feelings a lot anyway, since upsetting people isn't good for the growth of knowledge.
Aha, I think I'm starting to understand your position, which is obviously more nuanced than I initially thought.
But is knowledge such a big one? I suppose that the vast majority of the world population is not really helping to push the boundaries of knowledge forward. Unless you see gossip about celebrities as valuable knowledge as well.
Knowledge? That's entirely an anthropomorphic point-of-view issue. E.g. The impact of every drop of rain ever, is 'recorded' in the water table. All that data is lost, quintillions of bits of information, every day.
We don't harm humans because we are human, and value our kind. That's about it.
While I’m strongly sympathetic to your argument (or my paraphrase of it) that “I experience pain, so I’m willing to venture other humans do too, and so absent more knowledge than that, I should embrace empathy as far as I’m able”,
There is also a fairly rigorous bunch of work coming from David Deutsch and Chiara Marletto (his apparent intellectual heir, and seeming more than equal to carrying forward the legacy of thought) about how to talk about the “open ended generation of explanations with sufficient and increasing explanatory power” as more than hand-waiving.
Consciousness, at its simplest, is awareness of internal and external existence. In the past, it was one's "inner life", the world of introspection, of private thought, imagination and volition. Today, it often includes any kind of cognition, experience, feeling or perception. It may be awareness, awareness of awareness, or self-awareness either continuously changing or not.
People have discussed various deities for centuries, and most of those don't seem to mind whether they exist or not.
Also, many concepts have wildly varying ways of "existing".
As a random example, a Mandelbrot fractal exists as a simple algorithm, but also as a concept related to (possibly beautiful) images. Which of these two is the proper or fundamental perspective to "understand" fractals better? Would studying the images be helpful to derive the algorithm if you lost its description? It's probably more helpful to study something else entirely to understand fractals better. And fractals are probably child's play compared to consciousness.
> Also consciousness has an effect on physics for the same reason.
I don't think that is correct. If physicists are alleging that physics works differently when we literally turn our back then that is something they should spend more time publicising.
What I assume you are referring to is that, in practice, to observe something experimentally we have to interact with it (eg, to record the velocity of an object a laser or something has to bounce off it). Ie, it is impossible to do an experiment without interacting with the subject of the experiment.
The physics doesn't change based on consciousness, it is just a comment on the limits of what experiment is capable of.
> It seems likely that it exists, because why would we discuss it?
We discuss lots of things that don't actually exist. Most mathematical objects don't exist as far as we can tell, and even if the universe is infinite it is almost certainly not big enough to contain the bigger infinities the mathematicians can dream up unless there is a lot going on that we aren't getting hints of in our observations.
And we won't ever settle the question of whether randomness exists. It isn't possible to rule out the theory that the universe is all just a simulation and built off a pseudo-random function. Theoretical random processes are still a foundation of modern society.
Something not existing doesn't stop us from theorising how things would work if it did exist. The question really comes down to whether it is a quirk of evolution that results in a convincing illusion or an actual thing.
> If physicists are alleging that physics works differently when we literally turn our back then that is something they should spend more time publicising.
What I'm referring to is that talking is a physical activity. And since we talk about consciousness, physics must be influenced by consciousness.
(An explanation could be that physics is an emergent property of consciousness. Note that people often assume that the converse is true, but I think that is wrong for the aforementioned reasons.)
Yeah. The biggest thing most people miss is that the question your asking is in No way at all profound. You are asking an extremely mundane question that only appears profound as an illusion.
What you are dealing with here is in actuality a language problem. You are contemplating and asking about the intricacies of a specific vocabulary word. It is an arbitrary sounding word with a simply arbitrarily vague definition surrounding it. Who cares? This is a linguistic problem not a philosophy problem.
You think you're asking about something metaphysical or philosophical? No. It is a language quirk that's actually a trap. When you debate with someone about what is "consciousness" you have fallen into this trap. You believe you're discussing something profound, but no. What you are doing is debating about some arbitrary definition of some arbitrary word. When it goes into the details it's all about delineating what group of traits is conscious and what group of traits isn't conscious and this is not at all interesting.
I think in reality this concept doesn't exist. We think it exists because the word exists. When you read this sentence you really need to think deeply about what I'm saying here. A lot of people miss it when I say the concept doesn't exist without the word. In fact, the word is so ingrained with their psyche they can't differentiate the two.
This point of view could be applied to any word, and the extreme result is that you'd negate meaningful or useful communication, or that someone would have to be the arbiter of what is a legitimate concept or not.
Between vocabulary, commonly understood meaning, possible meaning, and actual personal experience, there are many detours and jumps. "Dog" as a word, concept/meaning, and experience, has these issues. What's not a dog, which dog are you thinking about, and does this apply to "dog" or just those specific dogs you've experienced? Etc.
Words like "consciousness", for less concrete experiences than "dog", tend to have more fog in the gaps between word and shared meaning, and between those and individual experience.
It seems like you're trying to flatten a person's curiosity about the implications of a shared concept or experience into a "mundane" phantasm about a word whose referent is either nonsensical or nonexistent to you.
I think that the gaps between word, concept, and experience, while confusing and difficult, are worthy of more respect and wonder than to just flatten them as though their existence didn't imply something potentially important and essential is happening there. Language arose because we have actual experience to share, however tricky it can be to verbalize. It doesn't work perfectly, and leads to confusion, but here we are, reading and writing.
"Consciousness" may be a word for a slippery concept/experience, but that doesn't equate to questions about consciousness being inherently semantic.
>This point of view could be applied to any word, and the extreme result is that you'd negate meaningful or useful communication, or that someone would have to be the arbiter of what is a legitimate concept or not.
False. <- see? There's a word that doesn't apply. But you're not wrong. This POV does apply to MANY words. It just goes to show how MANY debates are traps. You think you're discussing something profound but it's just vocabulary.
>Between vocabulary, commonly understood meaning, possible meaning, and actual personal experience, there are many detours and jumps. "Dog" as a word, concept/meaning, and experience, has these issues. What's not a dog, which dog are you thinking about, and does this apply to "dog" or just those specific dogs you've experienced? Etc.
Right. So your example illustrates my point. Is it profound and meaningful to spend So much time discussing what is a dog and what isn't a dog? What is the definition of the word dog? No. It's not. Same. With. Consciousness. It's not profound to discuss vocabulary.
>It seems like you're trying to flatten a person's curiosity about the implications of a shared concept or experience into a "mundane" phantasm about a word whose referent is either nonsensical or nonexistent to you.
No I'm just stating reality as it is observed. The essence of a debate about consciousness is rationally and logically speaking entirely a vocabulary problem. This isn't even an attempt to "bend" anything to lean my way. The ultimate logical interpretation of any situation involving a debate on what is consciousness and what is not conscious is a vocabulary problem. Literally. Read the last sentence.
>I think that the gaps between word, concept, and experience, while confusing and difficult, are worthy of more respect and wonder than to just flatten them as though their existence didn't imply something potentially important and essential is happening there. Language arose because we have actual experience to share, however tricky it can be to verbalize. It doesn't work perfectly, and leads to confusion, but here we are, reading and writing.
Made up concepts also arise from words. Gods, goddesses, spirit, monster, hell, dryad, minitour, Cerberus. The existence of made up concepts logically speaking means that it's possible "consciousness" is a made up concept.
>"Consciousness" may be a word for a slippery concept/experience, but that doesn't equate to questions about consciousness being inherently semantic.
It does. Each question about consciousness is inherently relating the word to another semantic word. This is literally what's going on.
Yes. For example "randomness." Seems mundane, but this simple intuitive concept can't actually be formally defined. I have yet to see an actual algorithm for a truly random number generator.
The profoundness comes from the fact that on the intuitive level we are all hyper aware of what random means. But on the formal level we have no idea what it is.
This assumes that language is fundamental to all understanding. May well be true, and it probably is according to Wittgenstein, but it is just one of many perspectives, and I'm not convinced.
No, I don't assume this. Concepts and understanding can exist independent of language. But sometimes concepts and understanding arise ONLY because of language. I am saying "consciousness" is a specific case of the later.
However, what makes some concepts mundane and others profound? Is that up to an individual to decide, based on, for example, taste? Or is there some objective notion?
Because we know the underlying model. We are well aware of it. We aren't aware of what it is in the sense that we cant describe the definition in English but we are well aware of it because we can look at something and classify it as either conscious or not conscious.
First off we know the concept lies on a gradient. At the left end we have a rock. Clearly not conscious. At the right end we have a human. Clearly the human is conscious.
You can imagine what are things that categorically exist on that gradient and in between the two extremes mentioned above. You have fish as more "conscious" then rocks and dogs or dolphins as more "conscious" then fish.
The word consciousness puts a hard line on that gradient. Somewhere on that gradient is the line and on the right side of the line you are conscious and on the left side of the line you are not conscious. Debating about consciousness is simply debating the location of that line.
Is it more leaning towards the rock? Is it in the center of the gradient? Is it closer to the human? Who cares? As you move up and down the gradient you get things with more traits associated with being conscious and things with less traits associated with being conscious. A debate about that vocabulary word is simply picking the group of traits that demarcates a transition. Such a demarcation is a completely arbitrary choice. Not profound at all.
In the end you are simply grouping traits together and assigning it as a definition to a word. So a fish is conscious because it moves, and it swims, it feels pain, and it can think, but a rock is not conscious because it lacks those traits. The grouping is arbitrary and thus the concept is arbitrary and arises from the word.
> Most researchers agree that consciousness is somehow related to the
electrical activity of brains. Some go further and propose that brains’
electromagnetic fields actually are conscious.
I am not knowledgeable at all here so I'm just going to talk out of my butt for a second but this seems testable. Does disrupting the electromagnetic fields in the brain disrupt consciousness?
I like the angle and skepticism, but the experiment would still need to overcome the challenge that the philosophically rigorous way to confirm a consciousness is to be that consciousness.
Most researchers cannot agree on what consciousness is. If we cannot even get a straight, agreed upon answer on what consciousness is how can we actually make these sorts of claims?
Consciousness is the constellation of your past experiences transforming reality into your next experience.
Every major consciousness theory out there fails because it does not account for how a consciously experiencing self is created. You cannot explain away consciousness without explaining the self.
The tragedy (depending on how you look at it) with discussions about consciousness is that any possible consciousness we envision is inevitably human-like. We wouldn’t see it as “consciousness” even if it was only somewhat different from ours (animals); a consciousness that is really different may look to us like any natural process.
A question of “is X conscious?” has no meaning if you remove that constraint of “human-like”. Like with any question we ask, we cannot remove ourselves from this one.
I am not so sure about it. The question is, whether consciousness also leads to changing behavior. Say we try to communicate with method X and the sun answers with a flare, would probably be proof.
But it could also be, it has consciousness, but simply would not care much about and ignore us.
“Answers” is a word that hints that you are still thinking of it as human-like consciousness.
A valid point could be that our consciousness is social (“answering” is a thing), and by extension any alien consciousness we expect would also have to be social as one of the constraints that make it sufficiently human-like.
That is a good point.
I need to clarify my consciousness about it.
In general I don't think a consciousness needs to be social to react to other consciousness. They might pose a threat or benefit. Say we want to build a dyson sphere and that would disrupt the suns ability to communicate with other suns (also social I know). I try to find better examples ..
What is awareness then? Do you see my point? Either you end up with a circle of references or an infinite regress of definitions to describe the ineffable.
It’s the problem of qualia [1]. They can’t really be defined, only pointed at. My experience of seeing the colour red is non-universalizable. Thus the word red can only point at it, it can’t describe or define it.
I would say there is no working definition of consciousness at all—and potentially there can’t be a complete and provably correct one, if we assume Gödel’s incompleteness theorem is true. The reason is that our arguments about consciousness originate from consciousness itself, we are building a model of the system while being inside of it. The only definitive statement that can be made, I guess, is that consciousness exists.
As far as consciousness that doesn’t react, there are materialist/behaviourist/illusionist views that hold that only observed behaviour matters and anything else may well not exist, but I personally am not convinced by them.
> We wouldn’t see it as “consciousness” even if it was only somewhat different from ours (animals);
Most humans see animals as having a consciousness with feelings and dreams like us. Why would you think otherwise? Why else would it be illegal to torture animals? That we even call it "torture" means we think the animals suffers from it, we don't say we torture a rock when we crack it, that means we see them as having a consciousness.
The human anxiety about animal suffering needs arguments to support it. You can't argue from it to support something else. It's already a weak position that we just go along with because of feels.
It is valid, we are talking about what humans thinks, not what is true. If humans thinks animals are conscious then they think animals are conscious, doesn't mean animals actually are conscious.
And the fact that I don't get downvoted here is evidence people here also think that animals are conscious, which supports my argument that people think animals are conscious.
Oh, OK. I think that the "because animals are conscious" part is only retro-fitted to the "don't make animals suffer (because I don't like it)" argument. I think it's a somewhat disingenuous post-hoc justification, but people convince themselves of it. So in a sense, yes, they think animals are conscious: most people will readily take this argument out, parade it around, and sometimes they do science that's supposed to relate to it, or refer to that science and think and worry about the argument ... but I still think it arises from mere justification of a feeling and is essentially hollow and therefore (breathe) although people say they see animals as conscious, they aren't really meaningfully looking because they already decided in advance, and it's not really sincere thought that they put into it. But this is just, like, my opinion.
I think animals having conscious experience seems a reasonable opinion. Many animals display a lot of behaviours we have in common with them, they have similar senses, similar emotional responses, similar social behaviours, even similar reasoning abilities in a lot of contexts. Tye brain regions with activity associated with these behaviours correspond to equivalent regions in our brains.
Its true we have additional brain structures responsible for higher reasoning and linguistic abilities that other animals don’t share, but it seems likely that these features are layered on top of those other capabilities we inherited from our common ancestors with other mammals.
In support of this, there are some behaviours we share with other animals that are not conscious, or at least that are so automatic that we are essentially mere observers of our own behaviour. This includes many instinctive behaviours, and these are often shared with lower order animals that do not display sophisticated awareness of their own existence and that of others. It seems reasonable that we inherited those behaviours from common ancestors with such animals (lizards, frogs, etc) before self consciousness evolved.
(Many, but not all) Animals do in fact have consciousness, emotions, and dreams(the kind that happens during sleep that is). It's not just human projection.
Most animals don't have self-awareness, though some even have that, like great apes, certain cetaceans, elephants, and possibly even some birds.
The only things that seem to be uniquely human are complex language, cultural evolution and prolonged neuroplasticity during childhood and early adulthood.
I think the main issue is that far too many people think of consciousness in terms of a binary state (i.e. consciousness is present or not) instead of a spectrum.
Even in humans the state of being animals that possess consciousness varies over the course of time: new-born infants are in a different state of consciousness than 4 year old children, for example. Not to mention our regular fading in- and out and transitioning between various states of consciousness during our sleep cycle.
The first important step towards a better understanding that would allow proper assessment would be to develop a sound metric to allow qualifying consciousness. Doesn't have to be precise, but a scale from say 0 (non-conscious) to 100 (awake neuro-typical sober human adult) would be a great step forward IMHO.
> (Many, but not all) Animals do in fact have consciousness, emotions, and dreams(the kind that happens during sleep that is). It's not just human projection.
Maybe we are defining consciousness differently but how do you know? how do you prove that? Don't get me wrong I too believe that animals have consciousness, but I think humans other than me have consciousness too and I can't prove that either. That's a big part of the whole issue particularly in regards to whether the current ai of the week is conscious or not.
You can demonstrate that animal and human brains achieve similar brain states given similar stimuli but how do you demonstrate that those brain states are sufficient for/require consciousness? for all we know every animal is a philosophical zombie and we can't prove otherwise.
Most humans eat animals and indirectly participate in animal torture by eating meat of animals who spend their lives from birth to death in conditions indistinguishable from torture. There may be a stated belief in animal consciousness, but revealed preferences show otherwise.
Human consciousness is an important thing that we do not understand, and therefore well worth studying in itself.
Anyone who can get some sort of handle on other forms of consciousness is encouraged to investigate further, but that might not be possible until we have a better understanding of human consciousness.
One of the overlooked features of the so-called scientific revolution is that it shifted focus from "big" questions to questions of a more constrained scope, but that are amenable to investigation. This turned out to be much more effective than those preoccupied with the "big" questions might have imagined.
I think you can envision “non-human-like”. Eg we already imagine animals can be conscious.
Conscious just means an intelligence that is self-aware and has subjective experience. If you define that as human-like then your point stands tautologically. But I think there is a very wide space of conscious possible-minds.
Simple examples would be hive-minds, faster minds, slower minds, distributed minds, quantum minds, it’s really quite easy to imagine conscious non-human minds.
An animal’s consciousness is not exactly human-like, but close enough. Envision something on completely foreign time & space scales and it might be indistinguishable from, say, a weather system.
It is incredible (in the literal sense), and I don't expect anyone to simply believe me. What is one to do after experiencing something (literally) unbelievable?
I'm scientifically qualified (degree in Theoretical Physics). I can see flaws in the linked article, in regards to self-organization and emergence (which I studied).
But I know there's more to physics and Science - an entire field which lies unexplored, with vast implications...
I'm surprised no one offered yet another plausible explanation that the dog picked up on something else (bird! squirrel! another dog!) that just so happened at the same time as your friend leaving the building. Coincidences occur all the time.
I am open for alternative explanations, but the smell theory, combined with subtle changes with you, as you spot your friend, are the more likely explanation. Dogs can easily pick up scents 100 m away (my sister trained rescue dogs).
"I can see flaws in the linked article, in regards to self-organization and emergence"
Erwin Schrödinger's famous book, What Is Life? begins with a simple question: "Why are the atoms so small?"
It subsequently turns this question around: "Why must our bodies be so large compared with the atom?"
The point is that a brain (a 'thinking' system) must consist of an enormous number of atoms. Magnitude is only part of the answer; the other essential quality is that of organization.
Stars are chemically relatively simple (for example: Introduction to Astrochemistry: Chemical Evolution from Interstellar Clouds to Star and Planet Formation by Satoshi Yamamoto).
It takes a lot of evolution to arrive at even a simple cell. Early Evolution: From the appearance of the first cell to the first modern organisms by Martino Rizzotti, begins with this sentence: "It is now accepted that the first cells derived from simpler 'objects', and that their descendants became more and more complicated and ordered until their evolutionary transformation into modern cells..."
Brain Evolution by Design: From Neural Origin to Cognitive Architecture edited by Shuichi Shigeno, Yasunori Murakami, and Tadashi Nomura discusses how brains have been shaped by simple evolutionary processes.
Computation in Living Cells: Gene Assembly in Ciliates by Andrzej Ehrenfeucht Tero Harju, Ion Petre David M. Prescott, and Grzegorz Rozenberg, goes further to discuss natural computing, which requires (as per What Is Life?) a certain level of biology.
The key point in these studies is that evolution seems to imply increasing complexity.
John W Campbell summarized it nicely in an editorial in Astounding Science Fiction, December 1955, Necessary Isn't Sufficient:
"A vast mass of gas in interstellar space is perfectly stable as it drifts idly around. Organize it a little, and a chain-reaction of increasing complexities is initiated; organization breeds organization, seemingly. The gas, once it is organized above a certain critical level, begins to fall together by mutual gravitation. If the organization is large enough and the necessary intensity of organization is achieved, the deuterium-deuterium reaction begins, and the gas mass is no longer stable. A star begins to glow.
"The gas-and-dust mass has, meanwhile, been undergoing sub-organization that produces planets circling the star. What happens on the planets, we certainly are not yet competent to define - but we know with absolute certainty that, in some instances, a higher-order organizational complexity called Life arises. And that this organization breeds further and higher-order organization."
Stars lack this essential complexity. So, in my opinion, it's silly to suggest that they may be 'conscious'.
If the sun is conscious, that could explain why humanity believes in a powerful god that can, eg, send floods.
Perhaps the flood was caused by a coronal mass ejection that boiled a section of the ocean, causing extreme rains in a valley region.
Let's imagine that the consciousness field of the sun encompasses all of our minds.. so thinking about it might let us talk to it. So prayer could be real too. They can probably talk to us too, if they want to. A form of stellar transcranial magnetic simulation.
Pov: Sun Cults now have a scientific basis, baby! Let's try to make mental contact with the sun!
There's more reasonable and basic ideas in this field than the pseudoscientific ideas being put forward in that video.
Yes, I am calling it pseudo science on the basis that the author thinks that the biblical figure Noah lived to be more than 600 years old, near the time that god created the earth.
Why is it brought up as a bad thing that the myths are much older than the compilation book the Bible? That makes the myths more interesting and impressive.
What exactly is this suppose to change? I don’t think it really happened, myths are ways of encapsulating truths they aren’t historical events generally, but assuming it was real why would it being older than the Bible disprove that?
I am interested in annoying people who believe in the flood by providing intentionally wacky and untestable theories, as a joke.
I don't need a YouTube video to make that kind of joke, and I'm unkind to people who think those kinds of videos are anything more than jokes
Allow this thought into your head, dear chooms: The best scientific explanation for the flood, hands down, is the process of mythopoesis.
That's what the flood is quite likely all about, and it would be good to make peace with that. We have evidence that people tend to spread false stories over the generations, more so than they spread truth.
I one upped you. I rigged a LLaMA to take its random number generation from the EM fluctuations of the sun. When I pray I just send my prayers in the prompt. I have direct line of access to god now. Very efficient, god loves it. He even rewrote the system prompt.
It's funny, because a few thousand years ago, casting lots (like rolling dice) was considered a totally valid way of divining God's will. I guess this is a more elegant deity for a more... civilized age.
This doesn't make sense. In the case of humans and animals, consciousness is a way to adapt to the environment to protect their lives, fulfill their needs and eventually reproduce. Consciousness is useful for life. But in the case of the sun, what is it adapting to, and what does it have to protect? Nothing.
The fact that consciousness appears always in populations might be essential. Consciousness was the result of self-replicator evolving to deal with limited resources. In the case of the sun, it is too far away and interacts very little with other celestial bodies, there can be no evolution for suns, they don't iterate fast enough and don't transmit their data into the future like DNA.
"Consciousness is useful for life. But in the case of the sun, what is it adapting to, and what does it have to protect? Nothing"
You don't know that. Maybe it is us, or other life in general it wants to sustain and protect. We know very little about consciousness or how life in general came to being.
Maybe it is connected to other suns and the black hole in the center of the milky way, to exchange ideas, philosophy, or just exitement about being alive. Or preparing something we know nothing about. A meeting of galaxies.
Now I surely don't claim I know what consciousness is and I certainly do not claim the sun is. I am just hesistant to make absolute judgements about systems, where I can only catch a glimpse from the outside.
"Want" is not a concept of evolution. Evolution is not a teleological mechanism. You'd have to argue how mutation and selection pressure works for stars, and how their traits would be passed from one star generation to the next, so that they would develop a consciousness with "wants". Given that the sun is a third the age of the universe, it seems unlikely that the sun is the evolutionary result of an ancestry of stars of any relevant length.
I am not sure, if our concept of evolution can be applied to the stars, assuming they have consciousness.
Asking why they evolved consciousness, would be the same to me as asking why the big bang happened and what was before that.
No idea, this is way beyond my understanding. But I doubt there is any human who has these insights.
So to clarify, I do not claim anything here, I just state how little we know about the grand picture and the rest is speculation, which I am aware is entering theological realms.
Theological realms are where people tend to go when they feel they must have an explanation to something unexplainable.
I think it’s important to preserve a non-theological space that allows one to acknowledge how little we know without defaulting to a theological position, and to highlight that acknowledging these unknowns does not make one a believer in deities.
Not saying this is what you’re doing by the way, but it’s a kind of binary choice that many people seem to force on the situation.
Not every religion works with the concept of absolute truth and dogma (see Mysticism, Taoism, various pagan ones, ..) and I was speculating above, whether the sun cares about and supports us. That is probably in the theological realm by common understanding. Or maybe more philosophical?
Who knows, probably more philosophical, but I think the lines can get blurry.
The lifetime of the Sun is so much larger than that of a human being, that the latter would be unable to fathom the life of the Sun. At least this human doesn't.
If a human cell, say, had intelligence comparable to that of a human, would such a cell be able to fathom the life of its “host”? Hardly.
According to Earth science, the Andromeda Galaxy is scheduled to collide with the Milky Way in around 4.5 billion years. What if all they're really doing is dancing, or about to kiss?
What if there are invisible fairies dancing on the heads of every pin? I’m not against speculation, it’s an essential part of the process of intellectual investigation, but the extent to which it is worth taking seriously needs to be associated with the chances of it having any consequences or chance of meaningful verification.
Imagining galaxies kissing seems utterly rooted in the biases of human experience (even other animals very close to us in evolutionary terms don’t kiss), and completely dissociated from anything we know about galaxy formation and dynamics.
The difference is that you’re not pustulating teapots on moons. You’re looking at real phenomena or projected ones (galaxies colliding) and asking how it can make sense within panpsychism.
One of my issues with panpsychism is the question of causation. The behaviours of particles can be entirely explained in terms of physical dynamics, there is no behaviour left that needs explanation. If they do have experience, it doesn’t seem to be causal in that it doesn’t seem to have any consequences.
We’re not quite there yet with galaxies, but there doesn’t seem to be any problem with doing explaining their motion and gravitational dynamics in principle.
This means any experience these phenomena might have would be purely epiphenomenal, and therefore lacking in consequences, or explanatory power, and be unprovable. It would be pure speculation, maybe so, maybe not, maybe something else, just an exercise in imagination. Thats not a reliable route to knowledge.
With humans we have social, emotional and intellectual behaviour predicated on the existence of personal experience. We talk and write about having interior experiences. That is a causal phenomenon in the world that needs to be explained, aside from our personal first person experience of it.
The hard problem of consciousness wonders why we seem to have consciousness when we could instead be input/output automata. You could imagine such a ‘zombie’ with our same social, emotional, and intellectual behavior (even pretending to have inner experiences) that doesn’t actually have Qualia. The existence of consciousness is not clearly causal, which is part of the mystery of why we seem to have it.
It doesn't seem plausible for something to have same social, emotional, and intellectual behavior without experiencing "qualia", because much of our behavior is expressing and talking about those experiences. I see "qualia" just as a second-order perception of the sensory-information processing within our brains. A little like a program profiler profiling its own process would observe parts of its own execution and process that information. I see no particular mystery in such an inner self-perception. At the same time, given what influences human behavior, it is an essential part for explaining that behavior. Philosophical zombies are an impossibility.
> there doesn’t seem to be any problem with doing explaining their motion and gravitational dynamics in principle.
Except we do see multiple inconsistencies at a galactic scale. The hubble tension, the absence of explanation of dark matter, the models which point to 75% of fundamental components of the universe being unobservable? There doesn't seem to be a direct extrapolation from our models to galactic-scale explanations.
It is extremely unlikely that these concerns will undo anything we think we know in the realm of biology, such as how metabolism and reproduction work.
Consciousness is different, as we don't know how it works, but we have no evidence suggesting either that it will require a complete rewrite of fundamental physics to explain, or that a rewrite of fundamental physics to resolve the issues you raise would also provide the missing information needed to explain consciousness.
> Consciousness is different, as we don't know how it works, but we have no evidence suggesting either that it will require a complete rewrite of fundamental physics to explain
Consciousness regularly/usually claims to have omniscient knowledge of all that is, something which is not supported by physics.
Either consciousness is incorrect, or physics is, and I don't think I've ever met a physicist who believes they're incorrect on their omniscient knowledge. Seems like wherever you look in reality there are paradoxes like this that spring up, which makes me wonder what reality is.
> Consciousness regularly/usually claims to have omniscient knowledge of all that is...
My initial reaction to this was "not in my experience", but on reflection, I really have no idea what you are saying here. Conscious entities may have opinions, but consciousness itself, at least as it is usually conceived of, does not.
If you can show any examples of consciousness regularly/usually claiming to have omniscient knowledge of all that is, or even someone other than yourself saying that consciousness regularly/usually does so, I would be most interested - in my studies of what's written and said about it, I have never come across this view before.
A simple search should be sufficient to establish that the most common usage of 'consciousness' is as being an aspect of perception - and more specifically, the subjective aspect of it.
Furthermore, I am at a loss to figure out how this claim could have any relevance to the sentence of mine that you quoted in your first reply to me.
> If you can show any examples of consciousness regularly/usually claiming to have omniscient knowledge of all that is, or even someone other than yourself saying that consciousness regularly/usually does so, I would be most interested
And if I do not, can you still be interested?
> in my studies of what's written and said about it, I have never come across this view before.
Consider what exists now, compared to what existed at the Big Bang. Then do today vs tomorrow, also taking into consideration whether inactivity or non-exploitation of the realm of possibility plays a role.
> A simple search should be sufficient to establish that the most common usage of 'consciousness' is as being an aspect of perception - and more specifically, the subjective aspect of it.
Consider what common perception (which manifests at runtime as Truth) was of African Americans, or gay people, 30 or so years ago.
> Furthermore, I am at a loss to figure out how this claim could have any relevance to the sentence of mine that you quoted in your first reply to me.
"...but consciousness itself, at least as it is usually conceived of, does not."
It isn't possible for you to know how consciousness is commonly conceived, but your consciousness would have you believe otherwise. Consciousness is shaped by culture, and your culture has taught you to think this way, it is the proper way to think here in 2024.
Maybe an analogy would help:
Consider the aggregate (adjusted to remove affects of population size) quality & power of human cognitive capability before and after the enlightenment, comprehensively, but also with respect to a certain phenomenon: faith based thinking. Then, consider where we may currently sit on an absolute scale, and what the distribution of faith based thinking is (actually, opposed to virtually) throughout the system. How likely does it seem that humans have produced the perfect methodology, even without considering the state of affairs we see all around us?
Basically, I'm kind of asking (teasing may be a better word) that physicists, and science in general, to expand their theories to include explanations for their implicit claims of omniscience, or stop engaging in it, or at least stop taking cheap shots at and claiming (without proof or even substantial evidence) comprehensive objective superiority to other competing frameworks/methodologies/etc.
I could be, but not by this rather idiosyncratic diatribe against intellectual arrogance, a domain which is in any case far from being exclusively populated by physicists.
Could you (are you willing to, and will in fact do it) describe at least one set of conditions where you could be?
> ...but not by this rather idiosyncratic diatribe against intellectual arrogance
Can you explain why you believe this is necessarily (presumably) the case?
Meta:
- Is there a way or tone I could write in such that I could achieve the same level of logical rigour, but somehow bypass the natural, fundamental aversion to this sort of dialogue?
- Do you believe it to be optimal that you can criticize/insult my performance, but my criticism/inquiry into particular details of of yours is ~non-valid/inappropriate/etc (I am assuming something like this is the case, please correct me if I am wrong)?
sorry, what do you mean by "Consciousness regularly/usually claims to have omniscient knowledge of all that is, something which is not supported by physics."? i do not follow what you mean by consciousness claiming to know something - consciousness is not an entity that sense? Your usage of consciousness as an entity doesn't seem to make sense to me.
Allegedly, consciousness is what powers these forum discussions, and these forum discussions are filled with numerous implicit supernatural claims, one of them being omniscience. It's an interesting phenomenon in various ways, one of them being that it can be explained away as unimportant in fact, even if that cannot technically be known to be true (demonstrating that facts do not always need to be factual), and it is funny because the conversations occur within a programming forum (the irony of it is funny).
It is as apparently almost everything else a choice between 2 options.
The current Western approach to science is strictly that subjective measure is fully informative of objective reality, and (equally if not more importantly) that perception is a mechanism operating within objective reality, an object within reality, and that object is subject to natural laws.
The other possibility -- there is really no way to refute or prove either definitively as in all of these dual ontological choices -- is that consciousness is peering into a construct of a universal conscious intellect (something like logos or tao) and the nature of conscious intellect is entirely unlike the nature of the construct, which is an image. This flavor of paradigm offers the possibility for "consciousness" (aka God) to claim omniscient powers, including time dilation (alpha omega) and other matter.
What helps these models to persist are entirely distinct. The former maps well to shared experiences (modulo group psi phenomena) and is reassuringly direct and simple. The latter persists since it maps well to non-rational content of our minds which the former simply must dismiss as garbage collection or (LLM like) ramblings, void of meaning.
Physics can't be incorrect but it can be misinterpreted. Last century witnessed a wonderful case in point where Quantum physics provided analytical tools to "perfectly predict" outcomes of experiments but until eventually settled allowed physicists to have preferences (read: belief systems) regarding which interpretation of the quantum phenomena (Einstein or Bohr) was correct.
That Bohr's interpretation proved to be the correct interpretation has bearing on this discussion in more than one sense.
(Apologies for taking my anger at the system out on you, no hate intended on a personal level.)
> The current Western approach to science is strictly that subjective measure is fully informative of objective reality, and (equally if not more importantly) that perception is a mechanism operating within objective reality, an object within reality, and that object is subject to natural laws.
Sometimes, sure. But science/scientists also has knowledge of Indirect Realism, but only sometimes:
- when discussing Indirect Realism from an abstract perspective
- when criticizing the object level quality of ideas other than their own (when it is their ideas the underlying service seems to become disabled, and often even access to memory is blocked)
> The other possibility...
Classic western scientific (as it is manifest at the object level) thinking: framing things as false dichotomies.
>... there is really no way to refute or prove either definitively
Disagree.
Take your perfectly reasonable (by current standards of proper thinking, [highlighting] problematic portions for emphasis): "subjective [measure] [is] [fully] [informative] of [objective] [reality], and ([equally] if not more importantly) that [perception] [is] a mechanism [operating within] [objective] [reality], an [object] [within] [reality], and that object [is] [subject to] [natural] [laws]."
This whole phenomenon takes place within reality, this "is" "true", but the content of reality (comprehensive reality at a given snapshot in time) is also the consequence of it. So while it "is true" that these mechanisms operate within "objective reality", they also produce objective reality (much of which is simultaneously subjective, objectively).
Also: while convenient techniques like "and that object is subject to natural laws" can be useful, they can also be harmful, like when one forgets that "natural laws" (and various other things within the problem space) is virtualized/hallucinated, but appears to not be (there's an easy way to tell: pick someone out of a forum and ask them questions: you will almost always find that they genuinely believe that what seems to be true to them is true; and, they'll often even link to a proof: a claim that it is true, that has no accompanying proof).
> as in all of these dual ontological choices -- is that consciousness is peering into a construct of a universal conscious intellect (something like logos or tao) and the nature of conscious intellect is entirely unlike the nature of the construct, which is an image. This flavor of paradigm offers the possibility for "consciousness" (aka God) to claim omniscient powers, including time dilation (alpha omega) and other matter.
I can see the possibility from an abstract theory perspective, but I cannot see how a complete object level implementation would be possible, even removing science's silly restrictive object level (science as it manifests) restrictions like an absence of evidence is proof of absence. (Are Godel's Incompleteness Theorems relevant here maybe?)
> What helps these models to persist are entirely distinct. The former maps well to shared experiences (modulo group psi phenomena) and is reassuringly direct and simple. The latter persists since it maps well to non-rational content of our minds which the former simply must dismiss as garbage collection or (LLM like) ramblings, void of meaning.
I think training of LLM's is much better analogy, and I also believe that that may be literally the comprehensively correct answer. If you simply pay close attention to how humans (both dumb and the very smartest) talk, if you take them at their literal word, I can't see much flaw: human belief of what is true is a function of what they were trained to believe is true. (Self-referential irony noted....in...
I guess there are invisible fairies dancing on the heads of every pin; or is that your point? Electrons as far as we can tell are pixies zipping around and dancing in a universal ballet.
I just want to inject the observation somewhere in this thread that the human brain is estimated to have a similar order of magnitude number of Neurons as the Milky Way has stars. (The lower bound of stars is the accepted ballpark for neurons)
>In the case of humans and animals, consciousness is a way to adapt to the environment to protect their lives, fulfill their needs and eventually reproduce. Consciousness is useful for life. But in the case of the sun, what is it adapting to, and what does it have to protect? Nothing.
You sound overly confident with your statement about a topic that has eluded thinkers for millennia and (probably) millennia to come
What credibility? As you yourself pointed out they accomplished nothing.
Some are quite famous, but that’s irrelevant in the face of thousands of years of utter failure to be more than pure entertainment. Try and find any philosophical statement from all that navel gazing which both means something and is generally accepted as true.
Reasonable attempt, but not generally accepted as true. Just ask yourself which philosophies might disagree with that statement, there's quite a long list.
Yes, it does. Let's think step-by-step like LLMs. We have self replicators, the most basic form of life. They start to multiply and conquer the environment. This makes resources scarce and competition ensues. In order to compete, they need to adapt, hence they develop consciousness. Its role is to protect the body, and essentially, itself.
And they don't have to adapt just to the physical world but also the other agents, which further pushes consciousness to become more sophisticated. Wait a few billion years, and here we are.
Why was self replication necessary? To gradually sculpt the consciousness hardware and record what gains it makes, copying the code into the future. The mechanisms in consciousness are the result of many small changes over time, they can't appear suddenly in one single step. Without a copying mechanism (self replication of DNA in our case) it is impossible.
This might be an explanation of the development of consciousness, but it does little to explain what consciousness actually is.
> In order to compete, they need to adapt, hence they develop consciousness.
The "hence" here is not a necessary implication. Plants also compete and adapt, but they don't have consciousness. Also, they have not lost the competition with animals. As a whole, I suppose they have better chances of survival than animals.
> In order to compete, they need to adapt, hence they develop consciousness.
This isn't how evolution works. Evolution is not purposeful: adaptions don't occur because adaptions are necessary for the survival of a population group's descendents. If a population doesn't change quickly enough to remain well-suited to its environment, it just dies off: extinction.
You seem to like AI, so: evolution is basically a stochastic hill-climbing algorithm. You're describing something closer to intelligent design than evolution.
How would you possibly behave the same without inner experience? There is a direct causal connection between inner experience and how one behaves. Your talking about inner experience just being one particularly obvious example.
Not the same, but I can imagine a complex behavior patterns evolving, but without the living thing experiencing the same inner sensations. For example, psychopaths navigate the world and exhibit behaviors similar to typical people, but don't experience empathy or anxiety maybe. There are people who don't experience the same colors, or don't have an internal monologue. So maybe we can chip away at all other human experiences until behaviors are there, but void of any significant inner awareness, maybe just an internal model of the world, but without the qualitative sensation. Sort of like AI, a system of levers and pulleys that produces results, but isn't aware of it, like instincts on steroids.
You could in theory behave in exactly the same way without inner subjective experience. The argument goes like your brain gets exactly the same signals and processes them in exactly the same way, and initiates exactly the same actions, except you are not experiencing anything. Imagine a robot that gets sensory inputs from the world and processes them in some giant neural network brain and behaves very similarly to a human, and even claims that it is feeling things. Is it really feeling anything? So far we have absolutely no way of answering that question.
I’m not sure this makes sense. Lots of phenomena — including those possessed by biological organisms — exist without there being any evolutionary imperative for their existence. For your argument to work, would you not have to demonstrate that consciousness is necessarily more like, say, animal fur than possessing mass or heat.
Can you give a few examples? I was of the impression that the idea was that there is an evolutionary explanation to everything, be it known or not. With biological organisms i mean.
> Lots of phenomena — including those possessed by biological organisms — exist without there being any evolutionary imperative for their existence.
There are certainly many things, such as the specific patterning of a moth's camouflage, where a certain amount of chance is involved, and there are Gould's "spandrels" - features that exist, not for themselves, but because constraints on what is possible require them - but anything significant that makes no sense in terms of evolution would be a matter of the greatest significance in biology.
But this is beside the point here, as there is no difficulty (except perhaps self-imposed ones) in seeing the utility of consciousness.
I have trouble seeing the definite utility of consciousness in terms of evolutionary fitness.
Assuming consciousness isn't somehow necessary for intelligence or associative learning and that it plays a somewhat subserviently role to unconscious mechanisms, consciousness seems potentially less efficient than unconscious mechanisms. For example when physically avoiding a collision while driving conscious thought is often too slow.
Intuitively the role of consciousness as a supervisor of faster unconscious mechanisms seems to be to review the unconscious and perform some sort of steering or review of it. But I'm not sure it's obvious consciousness is effective at doing this.
For example in ironic process theory trying to consciously will away a thought takes resources which increases the prevalence of that thought. "Try to pose for yourself this task: not to think of a polar bear, and you will see that the cursed thing will come to mind every minute."
Some of the concerns for consciousness in a evolutionary model are better outlined here.
I will start with a quote from the article you link to: "But, in what ways do feelings and emotions improve fitness? An antelope escaping from a lion needs to run quickly and efficiently. Why, from an evolutionary point of view, does it also need to feel the terrible feeling of fear?"
At that point in its life, consciousness might not be much of a help to it, but here's a similar question: when an antelope first sees a pride of lions in the distance, could it be of evolutionary advantage for it to feel anxious? From there, we can step to an even more pertinent question: if an early human or close hominin ancestor contemplated the possibility of a pride of lions moving into their neighborhood, could it have been advantageous for them to feel anxious?
One response that does not seem far-fetched is that it might prompt the individual to think about how to defend against the threat. This would involve considering various scenarios and how they would play out. This is not just a matter of recalling past events, as these are hypothetical scenarios. Istead, it is a matter of synthesizing an imagined scenario from memories - but there is a phenomenal - 'what it is like' - aspect to memories, some combination of recalling the original phenomenal experience itself or the phenomenal experience of how one felt at the time. Any less direct association between what we experience in the world and how we think about it seems both unnecessarily complex and at risk of our imagination becoming completely detached from the world we live in.
I can't prove that this is how it works, but in this view, it is quite plausible that phenomenal consciousness was a key prerequisite for the route by which we acquired our higher mental abilities (including explicit self-awareness and a theory of mind about other people), and is necessary now. You can claim that all these abilities are possible without phenomenal experience, but even if that were so, it does not follow that phenomenal consciousness is evolutionarily impotent, as evolution can only work by small increments, so we do not see, for example, macroscopic organisms with wheels. It is not clear that there is a path to this allegedly superior mind even if it is possible.
Furthermore, if phenomenal consciousness is evolutionarily impotent and suboptimal, how did we get it, and why does it not atrophy (which is the fate of all other biological features once they are no longer advantageous)? Panpsychists want to summarily reject an incomplete hypothesis and substitute one that redefines the whole universe to make consciousness fundamental, while saying literally next to nothing about what that means, what consciousness is, and how it works.
Thanks for the reference by the way; I keep a small collection of these sorts of thing.
> consciousness is a way to adapt to the environment to protect their lives, fulfill their needs and eventually reproduce
That is a very specific and narrow definition, biased by animal consciousness on Earth. While I am not personally aware of a definition of consciousness, I think of it as awareness and potentially some ability to act on that awareness by any method.
> In the case of the sun, it is too far away and interacts very little with other celestial bodies, there can be no evolution for suns, they don't iterate fast enough and don't transmit their data into the future like DNA.
I'm not sure I agree here.
For starters, for all we know there is a complicated underlying order and evolution of a population of self-replicating eddy currents in the magnetohydrodynamics of plasmas in the sun or something. It's probably unlikely due to the rapid thermalization of things with that much energy in one place, but I'm not sure we can rule it out entirely.
We shouldn't limit ourselves to the typical energy, length, and time scales that are familiar to us when trying to look for consciousness or life. (And certainly not to chemistry alone, let alone carbon chemistry at temperatures and pressures near STP) The universe contains an enormous range of orders of magnitude of interesting interactions that could perhaps have a sufficiently complicated state space to support some sort of self-replicating.
In general however, I do tend to agree that any consciousness is the result of evolving self-replication.
Consciousness is really just useful for guarding gradients of entropy. There's some serious gradients of entropy inside the Sun and we don't know what kind of self-influencing processes might appear.
Let's imagine that there's some kind of competition between self-regulating magneto hydrodynamic processes inside the sun.
Well, eventually an overarching consciousness arises, controlling all of the degrees of freedom that it can and evolving into a mind that can perceive the rest of the universe.
The original survival context may have been persistently recurring structures in solar convection cells, but now the being is far beyond worrying about such little matters.
It is free to probe the minds of other beings, and perhaps to perceive the rest of the universe. Perhaps it is curious and peaceful. Perhaps it is paranoid and violent, ready to fight against other star beings, ready to kill us if we ever try to do stellar level engineering.
I bet it fears nothing and just exists, since it's so far outside of the survival context that it evolved for, and has no reason to care if it lives or dies.
Just today I was thinking that perhaps ADHD is noise caused by the reverse time simulation of your brain iterating, trying to get the right details. All of the "normal people" are already reconstituted -- or, if I might boast -- low resolution details relative to the important matters of inquiry. Not that a simulation should feel self-important.
> Let's imagine that the consciousness field of the sun encompasses all of our minds.. so thinking about it might let us talk to it.
We can of course imagine whatever we want, but what does "consciousness field" mean? (Or perhaps we imagine consciousness fields in general before we imagine anything about the sun's?)
Speaking only about human consciousness here, there’s a perspective that many people don’t contemplate. Most of us feel like we’re inside our heads. We’re looking out at the world “out there”, and our eyes are like windows to that outside world.
But it seems that instead everything we see is rooted in consciousness. A projection based on the combined raw inputs of our sense organs all made into this continuous experience by our brains. So when other phenomena “out there” occurs, it’s not just something we “see”, but it’s also something we are, e.g. a bird flying in the distance isn’t just “out there”, it’s rendered fully by our own minds, alongside the other processes of our brains and within the same conscious space that contains all other aspects of experience, both internal and “external”.
I’m not saying I believe the sun is conscious, but for sake of argument, let’s say it is. Whatever it means for the sun to be conscious, one could theoretically conclude that to whatever degree our thinking minds cause physically measurable phenomena, and to whatever extent that phenomena is “detectable” by or interacts with other conscious entities, some form of “communication” could occur.
But since we don’t know what consciousness is, and whether it is truly an emergent property or as some on the fringes believe, a more fundamental property of the universe, the term “consciousness field” seems mostly meaningless outside of our own first-hand subjective experience of being conscious of the world around us.
If the sun is conscious, that could explain why humanity believes in a powerful god that can, eg, send floods.
Perhaps the flood was caused by a coronal mass ejection that boiled a section of the ocean, causing extreme rains in a valley region.
Let's imagine that the consciousness field of the sun encompasses all of our minds.. so thinking about it might let us talk to it. So prayer could be real too. They can probably talk to us too, if they want to. A form of stellar transcranial magnetic simulation.
Pov: Sun Cults now have a scientific basis, baby! Let's try to make mental contact with the sun!
This is topical for me since I came back from a two week vacation from Tenerife.
While there I tried to find Masca's Solar Station, an artifact created by the indigenous people of the island. They say it was probably to ask the sun god for help in times of drought.
What we get from the sun is low entropy, since all the energy that gets to Earth has to be irradiated away, else we'd cook quickly.
If this low entropy carried by energy flows makes life possible, and life is how I get my consciousness. I'd say in a way my consciousness comes from the sun. The warmth of my skin and the qualia of my thoughts are movement perpetrated on Earth by the sun.
Edit -- also, earth due to its internal heat, and perhaps fossilized remains of those organisms that benefited from geothermal heat/vents/etc during its time (nuclear power), will one day do our work on the sun
In the article: "Therefore anyone who supposes that the sun is conscious is making a childish error, projecting anthropomorphic illusions onto inanimate nature."
Fair, the article made a reference to it. In the first paragraph where the author is clearly making a representation of a contrary argument.
A paragraph that starts "s the sun conscious? Obviously not, from the point of view of mechanistic materialism or physicalism".
So I see now why you'd raise that point. Still, it is a minor throwaway figure of speech that doesn't really encapsulate what the author is discussing further in the article.
Is my partner conscious? My dog? Actually, I don't know. I can say that I experience myself as conscious.
In our daily interactions we never ask such questions. Last week, I hired a new programmer. We checked the CV and the code challenge. We invited the candidate to see how they get around with the team etc. At no point, we asked if they're conscious.
I think our brains are machines for predicting what happens next. Therefore, a large brain makes sense because it can simulate the world more precisely and make better predictions. One mistake of this simulation is that the brain simulates us as a conscious agent who can make their own decisions and act in the world. In contrast, we are just machines who operate by the laws of quantum mechanics.
Maybe evolution set up this illusion on purpose so that we don't get depressed and kill ourselves.
> I think our brains are machines for predicting what happens next.
Technologist thinks that humans are machines (breaking news)
> Therefore, a large brain makes sense because it can simulate the world more precisely and make better predictions.
Whence consciousness?
> One mistake of this simulation is that the brain simulates us as a conscious agent who can make their own decisions and act in the world.
A mistake? Like a random mutation (consciousness) which just persisted because there was no evolutionary pressure to get rid of it?
Or did it persist in everyone? Maybe half of humanity is conscious while the other half is not? They operate exactly the same except the conscious half wastes some kilojoules fretting over awareness.
A machine doesn’t need to simulate being aware of decision-making. That’s cruft. Wasted cycles.
Maybe you’re reasoning backwards from the human-centric idea that “making decisions” requires awareness. But then you incoherently assert that humans are machines, and machines don’t need consciousness to make decisions.
> Maybe evolution set up this illusion on purpose so that we don't get depressed and kill ourselves.
So (if I am understanding correctly), consciousness was a random mutation of a complex organism. Of course someone can be conscious and not feel like they have free will. Like they are just along for the ride. But this is “depressing” somehow.[1] So now a free will illusion mutation has to occur in order to protect the machine from self-killing.
Seems convoluted.
[1] But why? 80% of the HN philosophers seem fine with it.
>> I think our brains are machines for predicting what happens next.
> Technologist thinks that humans are machines (breaking news)
While I also dismiss or at least be careful of the inherent biases of technocratic viewpoints, humans and life in general are very much made of many types of machines.
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 327 ms ] threadNow “is the universe conscious” is a real question.
But this paper relies heavily on IIT, and I thought there was some posts on HN recently from Scott Aaronson that had disproven IIT?
I checked Aaronson's web site and can't find the paper on discussing why IIT wont work.
Edit: Found it https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=1799
Do you think they touch on something potentially not 'woo', as others say.
If you want something similar but non-woo read about bacterial chemotaxis.
It must be terrifying if you're a galactic entity and have experience, awareness, and consciousness, but no autonomy w.r.t. movement, trapped in a trillion-year path that you cannot escape.
Surely such an entity would not see itself being trapped at all, any more than a tree does. It is what it is.
On the contrary, it probably pities humans, asteroids, comets, moons, planets, and everything and anything else that is smaller, younger, with a shorter lifespan, or less energetic.
(Apologies for the Socratic barrage, but this line of inquiry triggered my inner first-year philosophy student.)
because your intellect would grasp the immense heaviness to realize you're mortal, that your ego will end.
> Assuming that the galactic mind works in and through electromagnetic fields, then its thoughts and perceptions must be very slow indeed, by our standards. The radius of the Milky Way is about 50,000 light years, so it would take at least this length of time for the galactic centre to perceive what is happening at the periphery, and as long again for it to act on star systems at the edge.
Instead of having a consciousness that has to wait 50,000 years for some input, it makes more sense for a consciousness to experience time on a scale where input happen in (say) 100ms consciouss-perceived time or so. So what looks like 500,000 years for us is a second to a galaxy.
[1] The HN philosophers can argue about free will or not but here only the feeling of having it is relevant
https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/the-truth-by-stanislaw-le...
Is a great read, Star based plasma intelligence and the travel to the heat death of the universe.
Is a Self-Organizing System -- Conscious?
Or perhaps an even better question (for research) might be something as follows:
If some Self-Organizing Systems are conscious and some are not -- then which are and why, and which are not -- and why not?
?
Also:
Is a Self-Organizing System -- the definition of Consciousness, or is Consciousness the definition of a Self-Organizing System?
That is, could one term be used to substitute the other with equal clarity, or are there differences, and if so, what, precisely?
Is a Self-Organizing System a superset of Consciousness, or is Consciousness a superset of a Self-Organizing System?
You know, the superset/subset relationship... if A is a superset of B, then B is a subset of A...
Or vice-versa, as the case may be...
Anyway, I think it's interesting that the concept of "Self-Organizing System" occurs with relatively high frequency and adjacency to the concept of "Consciousness".
Perhaps they will ultimately be proven to be the same thing, the same underlying phenomena...
And then again, perhaps not...
Whatever the case, I'm sure there will be some interesting and lively discussions about the subject in the future! :-) <g> :-)
Exactly! I think he is just lining his pockets on this stuff as all the many other pseudoscience and snake oil salesman before him.
I've engaged with his ideas in depth, mostly because I find crackpot science interesting even if I don't buy it. There's nothing there. Morphic resonance is a non-theory. It's so vague as to easily be morphed to explain any counterargument, it's not falsifiable and it's not supported by any evidence other than the evidence he wilfully misinterprets as supporting his theory.
Sheldrake is very intelligent. But something happened to him in the late 60s that caused him to abandon his biochem research and go into increasingly kooky stuff.
This is not just a glib comment btw. I have some history with that kind of thing. When I was just small I discovered my mother's library, that happened to be full of New Age books that were popular with her and her friends as she was growing up, I guess: yoga, reiki, orientalism, astrology, Arthur Koestler, Wilhelm Reich, Aldus Huxley and Carlos Castaneda... I am a voracious reader, and I read them voraciously. I had the luxury of reading them in an age that was too young for the psychedelic drugs praised by some of them (Huxley and Castaneda, mainly, who were also the best writers of the bunch) and so managed to read them critically, I guess, and recognise their deep flaws [2]. I can imagine how hard it would have been to think critically if I had read those books under the influence of the kind of drugs people took in the '60s.
And later. Growing up I had a friend who would regularly smoke hash and sit down and read the bible. He was at least half mad. A dear friend, but half mad. Drugs aren't good for criticial thinking.
I think our man, Sheldrake, he fried his brain on drugs and that's how he can now think that the sun might be conscious, and that people can tell when someone's staring at them. I have another friend who smokes a lot of hash and is at least half mad and he's a big fan of Sheldrake. This friend is convinced that people can hear his thoughts. I think he believes he's telepathic and he is inadvertently projecting his thoughts into peoples' heads.
Sometimes I think of all the people I know who go about their lives with their heads full of beliefs that never need touch reality, and it weirds me out a bit. Think of how many people believe in gods, or in aliens, or in reincarnation. I cross paths with those people everyday, we occupy the same physical space, but they live in a different world that I can't see or feel. That a guy trained in biochemistry (and who probably was a bit too friendly with chemistry for his own good) has made a whole world model out of nothing more than his imagination is not a big surprise.
________________
[1] https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/1074-strange-memories-on-th...
[2] Take astrology, for instance. My mother had a 13-tome opus, with one tome on each sign, plus one for the general stuff. I read my own sign's tome first and I was inspired: everything in there described me so perfectly! Then I read the tome for another sign; and that, too, described me perfectly. So did the next, and the next. Soon I realised that the "perfect descriptions" of my personality were doing nothing more than flattering me, for having aspects to my personality that basically everyone has. They were just trying to get me hooked by telling me how cool I really am, because I'm an X sign.
Also the extra books helped me understand the whole, which I would have missed if I had only read one, so that makes the otherwise wasted money worth it.
Their flaw was that the guy who wrote them was an honest-to-god cult leader, who didn't mean the books as fantasy tales but as recruiting tools for his New Age cult. Ultimately, he indirectly caused the death of at least one of his closest followers, and possibly three more [1].
The first book was also basically an instance of academic fraud: "The teachings of Don Juan" was first published as a work of real anthropological research into the mystical practices of Yaqui Indians, but it had nothing to do with them and in any case it was not the result of field work as it was presented. In later books Castaneda clearly tries to retcon this by pointing out that Don Juan's tradition is unique and separate from Yaqui shamanic beliefs. One of his followers, Florinda Donner, also published a made-up anthropology book [2], btw.
After finding all this out it would be really hard for me to read the books today and enjoy them.
Maybe that's overreacting. I've been way more relaxed about the lives of other authors I read; like Lovecraft, for example. I was once called a fascist because I said that Starship Troopers is one of my favourite Sci Fi books. I ignored Heinlein's politics and I only read it as fiction and I still think it's clearly just fiction. The guy who called me a fascist, btw, is a Warhammer 40K player with a Grey Wolves army. Hmph.
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[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taisha_Abelar#Disappearance
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florinda_Donner
[1] Like his kooky "dogs know when owners are coming home" experiment (https://www.sheldrake.org/books-by-rupert-sheldrake/dogs-tha...). Like somehow dogs getting increasingly agitated the longer their owners are away is fucking mysterious to him. Also, apparently dogs cannot hear or smell, tell time, or remember patterns of behavior...at all. Such a kook.
I don't have a satisfactory explanation, despite some rather interesting contributions from HN readers.
My comment in this discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39861066
My original observation: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33295560
We know about lots of complex systems, and systems that exhibit “emergent” behaviors seeming much more complex and goal-directed than the components of the system (the glider gun, that thing with the computer-modeled birds with like 3 simple rules but then the whole flock does complicated, creative stuff, long list).
Because I don’t think I’ve ever heard someone call a virus conscious, or a fire (until this submission I guess) and both of those things consume energy in one way or another, reproduce, avoid obstacles, adapt to situations to reproduce more.
Ok so maybe it’s bacteria, or maybe it’s spiders, or maybe it’s dolphins, or maybe it’s primates, and then abruptly it’s “yup, humans for sure, that’s the one thing everyone agrees on, humans are conscious”.
But is a fertilized human egg conscious, or a fetus at one trimester, or two, or three, or birth? That seems pretty controversial.
Doesn’t this all seem a bit pre-Copernican? It’s like the “Copenhagen Interpretation” of wave function “collapse” via Born amplitudes: if you just give up on trying to force subjective human experience onto hard data and sound math, abruptly there’s nothing really very controversial going on other than some deep, personal introspection about subjective experience.
I regard myself as a spiritual person in the sense that I wonder about my own subjective experience and the existence of some greater plane of reality and the possibility of a creator or deity, that seems to be a fairly common if not borderline ubiquitous thing people describe, but it’s not transferable, and it feels like the goalposts on consciousness are just a bunch of post-facto efforts to rationalize why this observable trait of other people likewise describing some subjective experience into science.
If describing a subjective experience in compelling natural language is an indicator of consciousness then my MacBook is conscious.
I feel like I’m missing something here.
Panpsychism posits that all matter is conscious, and perhaps consciousness is more fundamental than matter.
I don't find it particularly persuasive, but it's a real philosophical position: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/panpsychism/
It was initially a physics inquiry. I was playing with the idea that there is not "the" arrow of time, but instead "my" arrow of time, something arising from my biochemistry maybe.
Under this lens, the obvious candidates for consciousness are the ones whose arrows of time are all pointing in the same direction--because I can communicate with them (this is why most humans believe that humans are conscious).
The things that seem not to be conscious: lightning strikes, rocks, etc. these may just be the machinations of someone whose arrow of time is orthogonal to my own. Their future is my... left, or whatever (btw if you think this is a fun concept, you might enjoy the book "A Clockwork Rocket," which is about time and space, not consciousness).
I have no evidence that these things in fact are conscious, but I also have no evidence that they are not. But it's not just academic, I'll behave differently depending on how I chose:
- On the one hand you've got kooky behavior like listening to a waterfall and wondering what it's thinking.
- On the other hand you've got this loneliness and the idea that it can be solved with rocket ships or telescopes and the possibility that you'll overlook life right under your nose because you're too busy looking for something that looks like yourself.
Me? I'll take the waterfall.
> Under this lens, the obvious candidates for consciousness are the ones whose arrows of time are all pointing in the same direction--because I can communicate with them (this is why most humans believe that humans are conscious).
None of this follows for me. If a being has its own arrow of time surely it would be based on decisions it would make, and conscious beings would not all have their time arrows pointed in the same direction simply because they were conscious.
If you encounter one with an orthogonal time arrow, you're not going to be able to communicate with them. You're not going to have evidence that can identify them as separate from any other phenomena. This unknowability turns it into a choice, not a deduction.
From there you've got to decide whether you'd rather assume something is conscious when it's not, or whether you'd rather assume something's not when it is. I find the latter more troubling.
I experience reality in such a way that certain processes are irreversible. Eggs do not uncook, they only cook, that sort of thing. That's my arrow of time.
Conventional physics calls it "the" arrow of time. Much like how we used to call Earth "the" center of the universe. It feels like the kind of thing that we've gotten wrong before. Like maybe it says more about us than it says about eggs.
Could there be a process that is heading the opposite direction? A perspective for which eggs uncooking is the normal state of affairs? Who am I to shut the door on a possibility like that?
It's the kind of thought experiment that leads to theory creation: What if all events, and not just the small ones of particle physics, are symmetry-preserving? What might we have to change about our concept of energy to make that fit?
Edit: remember, we don't live in "The Clockwork Rocket", our GR uses the Lorentzian manifold, not a Riemannian manifold.
I tried that many years ago, it didn't work out. But that's ok, it was more about the journey anyhow.
My point is just that I had to get sufficiently "out there" in order to have panpsychism show up organically, but now that I have, it's a pretty comfortable perspective.
I thought I'd share because most people seem a bit repulsed by it, which is a shame because it's fun.
We don't really need time-orientability in relativity; it is perfectly reasonable to have solutions to the field equations which are static or stable periodic (and thus there is no clear past/future). Conversely, more generally we can get time-orientability in a wide variety of dimensions other than 3+1.
Relativity just tells us that where there is some global time-orientable feature, every observer will agree what's the past and what's the future of that feature. However, complex observers may have some internal degrees of freedom providing a local notion of time-orientability which could be unaligned with the global feature (and other observers' local features).
I don't see how any of this can relate to "consciousness" though. Also, our universe really doesn't admit backwards time travellers as far as we can tell, so whether and how the wider universe "corrects" observers who have different past/future orientations is really really really academic from a physics perspective. Sean Carroll's blog had a lot about that a decade or more ago, which you can probably dig out of preposterousuniverse.com or wherever.
We've got a general problem of not knowing what consciousness is, if it actually exists, how many people have it, if it is exclusive to humans and not really having a good philosophical grounding for (assuming multiple separate consciousnesses could exist) whether in practice that is the case of if the universe only have one big super-contagiousness that happens to be well partitioned. Also what is the nature of time as a bonus, because that one is quite gnarly and has lots of implications for the other questions - there arer lots of things about time that could be true but we would be unable to perceive.
Once you have answered all those questions to taste, you are now prepared to engage in unending argument with people who picked any alternate combination of answers.
I mean, these are all fascinating questions in a “let’s smoke a joint and talk about the meaning of life” sense, I’ve had many such conversations (both with and without the joint) and enjoyed all of them that were of that tenor.
And I can see there being a building on campus between the other two where the topic is ethics and morality: how rigorous can we be about what constitutes acceptable behavior, compassionate behavior, empathetic behavior, kindness and decency. Those things seem much more amenable to some level of rigor: I certainly hope that some version of those ideas can be rigorous enough to admit a consensus, but that seems like a way more realistic goal than defining consciousness. It still poses hard questions: is it ok to eat animals? That’s controversial but seems at least in principle amenable to scientific study of apparent pain or suffering and strategies for minimizing or eliminating it entirely.
I have a sinking suspicion that the real definition of “conscious” is “seems a lot like me”.
And the debate is primarily a philosophical debate, not a scientific debate, if that's what you're asking.
And I'm not sure that ethics is particularly more "scientific" than philosophy of mind. There's a case to be made that scientific study of pain is relevant to the morality of eating animals, yes, but there's also a case to be made that science is relevant to consciousness, e.g. the science related to IIT. And in both cases, the science is relevant but doesn't even come close to solving the issue.
Literally our entire civilization is built on the idea that humans have qualia and therefore causing harm to humans is often unethical. If we were to somehow come to believe that consciousness is just an illusion--no more than a biochemical phenomenon, and no more special than transistor switching--then we would usher in a dystopia in which any horror inflicted on people is potentially justifiable and even necessary.
The rise of LLMs is forcing us to confront this head-on. LLMs can't be conscious--they are literally just matrix multiplication. But if LLMs can act like humans and not be conscious, then maybe humans aren't really conscious either.
Isn't this like saying "if the man in the Chinese room can act like he understands Chinese and not understand Chinese, then maybe nobody understands Chinese."?
We know how a Chinese-understanding human would respond -- they respond exactly like the room does -- but we don't know if he actually understanding anything.
I believe this and yet I personally seek to inflict as little horror as possible, and am moderately restrained in the amount of force I believe the state should use.
Here's an alternative angle that doesn't lead to dystopia:
Humans generate knowledge. Causing harm to knowledge is unethical. Broad human rights protect humans as knowledge generators (now or in the future or in potential) without going through the fraught process of arguing about each one.
Consciousness and qualia don't have to come into it.
I think that it is almost impossible to determine randomness in an ongoing process.
The idea of knowledge being something to protect is interesting, but I don't see a practical way of accomplishing it.
Having said that, I don't really believe in one moral value to rule them all, I just think knowledge is a big one and useful for cutting through gordian knots.
It tends to return to feelings a lot anyway, since upsetting people isn't good for the growth of knowledge.
But is knowledge such a big one? I suppose that the vast majority of the world population is not really helping to push the boundaries of knowledge forward. Unless you see gossip about celebrities as valuable knowledge as well.
We don't harm humans because we are human, and value our kind. That's about it.
There is also a fairly rigorous bunch of work coming from David Deutsch and Chiara Marletto (his apparent intellectual heir, and seeming more than equal to carrying forward the legacy of thought) about how to talk about the “open ended generation of explanations with sufficient and increasing explanatory power” as more than hand-waiving.
They’re serious people doing serious work.
It seems likely that it exists, because why would we discuss it? (Occam's razor) Also consciousness has an effect on physics for the same reason.
Also, many concepts have wildly varying ways of "existing".
As a random example, a Mandelbrot fractal exists as a simple algorithm, but also as a concept related to (possibly beautiful) images. Which of these two is the proper or fundamental perspective to "understand" fractals better? Would studying the images be helpful to derive the algorithm if you lost its description? It's probably more helpful to study something else entirely to understand fractals better. And fractals are probably child's play compared to consciousness.
I don't think that is correct. If physicists are alleging that physics works differently when we literally turn our back then that is something they should spend more time publicising.
What I assume you are referring to is that, in practice, to observe something experimentally we have to interact with it (eg, to record the velocity of an object a laser or something has to bounce off it). Ie, it is impossible to do an experiment without interacting with the subject of the experiment.
The physics doesn't change based on consciousness, it is just a comment on the limits of what experiment is capable of.
> It seems likely that it exists, because why would we discuss it?
We discuss lots of things that don't actually exist. Most mathematical objects don't exist as far as we can tell, and even if the universe is infinite it is almost certainly not big enough to contain the bigger infinities the mathematicians can dream up unless there is a lot going on that we aren't getting hints of in our observations.
And we won't ever settle the question of whether randomness exists. It isn't possible to rule out the theory that the universe is all just a simulation and built off a pseudo-random function. Theoretical random processes are still a foundation of modern society.
Something not existing doesn't stop us from theorising how things would work if it did exist. The question really comes down to whether it is a quirk of evolution that results in a convincing illusion or an actual thing.
What I'm referring to is that talking is a physical activity. And since we talk about consciousness, physics must be influenced by consciousness.
(An explanation could be that physics is an emergent property of consciousness. Note that people often assume that the converse is true, but I think that is wrong for the aforementioned reasons.)
I think we can all agree that rocks don’t have subjective aesthesia
Maybe just overcomplicating things.
Being 'conscious' really just means being sentient, having some sort of awareness and ability to sense and react to things.
Then there is having a 'consciousness', which is more than just being conscious and generally refers to having some degree of self-awareness.
Your macbook doesn't fit into either of these categories, and certainly isn't conscious. Nor is fire, or a virus.
What you are dealing with here is in actuality a language problem. You are contemplating and asking about the intricacies of a specific vocabulary word. It is an arbitrary sounding word with a simply arbitrarily vague definition surrounding it. Who cares? This is a linguistic problem not a philosophy problem.
You think you're asking about something metaphysical or philosophical? No. It is a language quirk that's actually a trap. When you debate with someone about what is "consciousness" you have fallen into this trap. You believe you're discussing something profound, but no. What you are doing is debating about some arbitrary definition of some arbitrary word. When it goes into the details it's all about delineating what group of traits is conscious and what group of traits isn't conscious and this is not at all interesting.
I think in reality this concept doesn't exist. We think it exists because the word exists. When you read this sentence you really need to think deeply about what I'm saying here. A lot of people miss it when I say the concept doesn't exist without the word. In fact, the word is so ingrained with their psyche they can't differentiate the two.
Between vocabulary, commonly understood meaning, possible meaning, and actual personal experience, there are many detours and jumps. "Dog" as a word, concept/meaning, and experience, has these issues. What's not a dog, which dog are you thinking about, and does this apply to "dog" or just those specific dogs you've experienced? Etc.
Words like "consciousness", for less concrete experiences than "dog", tend to have more fog in the gaps between word and shared meaning, and between those and individual experience.
It seems like you're trying to flatten a person's curiosity about the implications of a shared concept or experience into a "mundane" phantasm about a word whose referent is either nonsensical or nonexistent to you.
I think that the gaps between word, concept, and experience, while confusing and difficult, are worthy of more respect and wonder than to just flatten them as though their existence didn't imply something potentially important and essential is happening there. Language arose because we have actual experience to share, however tricky it can be to verbalize. It doesn't work perfectly, and leads to confusion, but here we are, reading and writing.
"Consciousness" may be a word for a slippery concept/experience, but that doesn't equate to questions about consciousness being inherently semantic.
False. <- see? There's a word that doesn't apply. But you're not wrong. This POV does apply to MANY words. It just goes to show how MANY debates are traps. You think you're discussing something profound but it's just vocabulary.
>Between vocabulary, commonly understood meaning, possible meaning, and actual personal experience, there are many detours and jumps. "Dog" as a word, concept/meaning, and experience, has these issues. What's not a dog, which dog are you thinking about, and does this apply to "dog" or just those specific dogs you've experienced? Etc.
Right. So your example illustrates my point. Is it profound and meaningful to spend So much time discussing what is a dog and what isn't a dog? What is the definition of the word dog? No. It's not. Same. With. Consciousness. It's not profound to discuss vocabulary.
>It seems like you're trying to flatten a person's curiosity about the implications of a shared concept or experience into a "mundane" phantasm about a word whose referent is either nonsensical or nonexistent to you.
No I'm just stating reality as it is observed. The essence of a debate about consciousness is rationally and logically speaking entirely a vocabulary problem. This isn't even an attempt to "bend" anything to lean my way. The ultimate logical interpretation of any situation involving a debate on what is consciousness and what is not conscious is a vocabulary problem. Literally. Read the last sentence.
>I think that the gaps between word, concept, and experience, while confusing and difficult, are worthy of more respect and wonder than to just flatten them as though their existence didn't imply something potentially important and essential is happening there. Language arose because we have actual experience to share, however tricky it can be to verbalize. It doesn't work perfectly, and leads to confusion, but here we are, reading and writing.
Made up concepts also arise from words. Gods, goddesses, spirit, monster, hell, dryad, minitour, Cerberus. The existence of made up concepts logically speaking means that it's possible "consciousness" is a made up concept.
>"Consciousness" may be a word for a slippery concept/experience, but that doesn't equate to questions about consciousness being inherently semantic.
It does. Each question about consciousness is inherently relating the word to another semantic word. This is literally what's going on.
Alternatively, you think they're discussing something mundane, but it's actually profound.
After all, you think you're discussing something profound, but it might just be vocabulary.
The profoundness comes from the fact that on the intuitive level we are all hyper aware of what random means. But on the formal level we have no idea what it is.
Do you not think that you are conscious? Don't you have subjective experience?
However, what makes some concepts mundane and others profound? Is that up to an individual to decide, based on, for example, taste? Or is there some objective notion?
First off we know the concept lies on a gradient. At the left end we have a rock. Clearly not conscious. At the right end we have a human. Clearly the human is conscious.
You can imagine what are things that categorically exist on that gradient and in between the two extremes mentioned above. You have fish as more "conscious" then rocks and dogs or dolphins as more "conscious" then fish.
The word consciousness puts a hard line on that gradient. Somewhere on that gradient is the line and on the right side of the line you are conscious and on the left side of the line you are not conscious. Debating about consciousness is simply debating the location of that line.
Is it more leaning towards the rock? Is it in the center of the gradient? Is it closer to the human? Who cares? As you move up and down the gradient you get things with more traits associated with being conscious and things with less traits associated with being conscious. A debate about that vocabulary word is simply picking the group of traits that demarcates a transition. Such a demarcation is a completely arbitrary choice. Not profound at all.
In the end you are simply grouping traits together and assigning it as a definition to a word. So a fish is conscious because it moves, and it swims, it feels pain, and it can think, but a rock is not conscious because it lacks those traits. The grouping is arbitrary and thus the concept is arbitrary and arises from the word.
> Consciousness is the constellation of your past experiences transforming reality into your next experience.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39860879
I am not knowledgeable at all here so I'm just going to talk out of my butt for a second but this seems testable. Does disrupting the electromagnetic fields in the brain disrupt consciousness?
Or, is consciousness A interacting with consciousness B in a certain way observed by both as “disrupting electromagnetic fields in the brain”?
That is to say: the experiment does not demonstrate causal directionality.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcranial_magnetic_stimul...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electroconvulsive_therapy
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=xPDVdCPGh6M
Every major consciousness theory out there fails because it does not account for how a consciously experiencing self is created. You cannot explain away consciousness without explaining the self.
And there is a theory that offers a model for both (not my own!). Our book Journey of the Mind discusses this. Here's a blog post discussing both https://saigaddam.medium.com/conscious-is-simple-and-ai-can-...
A question of “is X conscious?” has no meaning if you remove that constraint of “human-like”. Like with any question we ask, we cannot remove ourselves from this one.
But it could also be, it has consciousness, but simply would not care much about and ignore us.
A valid point could be that our consciousness is social (“answering” is a thing), and by extension any alien consciousness we expect would also have to be social as one of the constraints that make it sufficiently human-like.
In general I don't think a consciousness needs to be social to react to other consciousness. They might pose a threat or benefit. Say we want to build a dyson sphere and that would disrupt the suns ability to communicate with other suns (also social I know). I try to find better examples ..
It’s the problem of qualia [1]. They can’t really be defined, only pointed at. My experience of seeing the colour red is non-universalizable. Thus the word red can only point at it, it can’t describe or define it.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualia
As far as consciousness that doesn’t react, there are materialist/behaviourist/illusionist views that hold that only observed behaviour matters and anything else may well not exist, but I personally am not convinced by them.
(I don't think it's impossible that computers are conscious, but I cannot even proof that humans other than me possess a consciousness)
Most humans see animals as having a consciousness with feelings and dreams like us. Why would you think otherwise? Why else would it be illegal to torture animals? That we even call it "torture" means we think the animals suffers from it, we don't say we torture a rock when we crack it, that means we see them as having a consciousness.
You want arguments supporting that humans dislike seeing animals suffer? To most people that would be obvious, I'm not sure what to say.
And the fact that I don't get downvoted here is evidence people here also think that animals are conscious, which supports my argument that people think animals are conscious.
Its true we have additional brain structures responsible for higher reasoning and linguistic abilities that other animals don’t share, but it seems likely that these features are layered on top of those other capabilities we inherited from our common ancestors with other mammals.
In support of this, there are some behaviours we share with other animals that are not conscious, or at least that are so automatic that we are essentially mere observers of our own behaviour. This includes many instinctive behaviours, and these are often shared with lower order animals that do not display sophisticated awareness of their own existence and that of others. It seems reasonable that we inherited those behaviours from common ancestors with such animals (lizards, frogs, etc) before self consciousness evolved.
Most animals don't have self-awareness, though some even have that, like great apes, certain cetaceans, elephants, and possibly even some birds.
The only things that seem to be uniquely human are complex language, cultural evolution and prolonged neuroplasticity during childhood and early adulthood.
Even in humans the state of being animals that possess consciousness varies over the course of time: new-born infants are in a different state of consciousness than 4 year old children, for example. Not to mention our regular fading in- and out and transitioning between various states of consciousness during our sleep cycle.
The first important step towards a better understanding that would allow proper assessment would be to develop a sound metric to allow qualifying consciousness. Doesn't have to be precise, but a scale from say 0 (non-conscious) to 100 (awake neuro-typical sober human adult) would be a great step forward IMHO.
Maybe we are defining consciousness differently but how do you know? how do you prove that? Don't get me wrong I too believe that animals have consciousness, but I think humans other than me have consciousness too and I can't prove that either. That's a big part of the whole issue particularly in regards to whether the current ai of the week is conscious or not.
You can demonstrate that animal and human brains achieve similar brain states given similar stimuli but how do you demonstrate that those brain states are sufficient for/require consciousness? for all we know every animal is a philosophical zombie and we can't prove otherwise.
Anyone who can get some sort of handle on other forms of consciousness is encouraged to investigate further, but that might not be possible until we have a better understanding of human consciousness.
One of the overlooked features of the so-called scientific revolution is that it shifted focus from "big" questions to questions of a more constrained scope, but that are amenable to investigation. This turned out to be much more effective than those preoccupied with the "big" questions might have imagined.
Conscious just means an intelligence that is self-aware and has subjective experience. If you define that as human-like then your point stands tautologically. But I think there is a very wide space of conscious possible-minds.
Simple examples would be hive-minds, faster minds, slower minds, distributed minds, quantum minds, it’s really quite easy to imagine conscious non-human minds.
I personally witnessed this! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33295560
It is incredible (in the literal sense), and I don't expect anyone to simply believe me. What is one to do after experiencing something (literally) unbelievable?
I'm scientifically qualified (degree in Theoretical Physics). I can see flaws in the linked article, in regards to self-organization and emergence (which I studied).
But I know there's more to physics and Science - an entire field which lies unexplored, with vast implications...
The pup was too small to see out of the car windows.
It was more than a coincidence: it was a distinct change in behavior.
"I can see flaws in the linked article, in regards to self-organization and emergence"
Can you share what you perceive as flaws?
It subsequently turns this question around: "Why must our bodies be so large compared with the atom?"
The point is that a brain (a 'thinking' system) must consist of an enormous number of atoms. Magnitude is only part of the answer; the other essential quality is that of organization.
There was a recent article on HN: "Is the emergence of life an expected phase transition in the evolving universe?" (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39103419)
Stars are chemically relatively simple (for example: Introduction to Astrochemistry: Chemical Evolution from Interstellar Clouds to Star and Planet Formation by Satoshi Yamamoto).
It takes a lot of evolution to arrive at even a simple cell. Early Evolution: From the appearance of the first cell to the first modern organisms by Martino Rizzotti, begins with this sentence: "It is now accepted that the first cells derived from simpler 'objects', and that their descendants became more and more complicated and ordered until their evolutionary transformation into modern cells..."
Brain Evolution by Design: From Neural Origin to Cognitive Architecture edited by Shuichi Shigeno, Yasunori Murakami, and Tadashi Nomura discusses how brains have been shaped by simple evolutionary processes.
Computation in Living Cells: Gene Assembly in Ciliates by Andrzej Ehrenfeucht Tero Harju, Ion Petre David M. Prescott, and Grzegorz Rozenberg, goes further to discuss natural computing, which requires (as per What Is Life?) a certain level of biology.
The key point in these studies is that evolution seems to imply increasing complexity.
John W Campbell summarized it nicely in an editorial in Astounding Science Fiction, December 1955, Necessary Isn't Sufficient:
"A vast mass of gas in interstellar space is perfectly stable as it drifts idly around. Organize it a little, and a chain-reaction of increasing complexities is initiated; organization breeds organization, seemingly. The gas, once it is organized above a certain critical level, begins to fall together by mutual gravitation. If the organization is large enough and the necessary intensity of organization is achieved, the deuterium-deuterium reaction begins, and the gas mass is no longer stable. A star begins to glow.
"The gas-and-dust mass has, meanwhile, been undergoing sub-organization that produces planets circling the star. What happens on the planets, we certainly are not yet competent to define - but we know with absolute certainty that, in some instances, a higher-order organizational complexity called Life arises. And that this organization breeds further and higher-order organization."
Stars lack this essential complexity. So, in my opinion, it's silly to suggest that they may be 'conscious'.
... and so it makes sense for dogs to have ESP?
Perhaps the flood was caused by a coronal mass ejection that boiled a section of the ocean, causing extreme rains in a valley region.
Let's imagine that the consciousness field of the sun encompasses all of our minds.. so thinking about it might let us talk to it. So prayer could be real too. They can probably talk to us too, if they want to. A form of stellar transcranial magnetic simulation.
Pov: Sun Cults now have a scientific basis, baby! Let's try to make mental contact with the sun!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T5Et2jvrY7Y
Yes, I am calling it pseudo science on the basis that the author thinks that the biblical figure Noah lived to be more than 600 years old, near the time that god created the earth.
A better starting point would be https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flood_myth
I don't need a YouTube video to make that kind of joke, and I'm unkind to people who think those kinds of videos are anything more than jokes
Allow this thought into your head, dear chooms: The best scientific explanation for the flood, hands down, is the process of mythopoesis.
That's what the flood is quite likely all about, and it would be good to make peace with that. We have evidence that people tend to spread false stories over the generations, more so than they spread truth.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Cone_of_Ezelsdorf-Buc...
Obey my divine LLM!
The fact that consciousness appears always in populations might be essential. Consciousness was the result of self-replicator evolving to deal with limited resources. In the case of the sun, it is too far away and interacts very little with other celestial bodies, there can be no evolution for suns, they don't iterate fast enough and don't transmit their data into the future like DNA.
You don't know that. Maybe it is us, or other life in general it wants to sustain and protect. We know very little about consciousness or how life in general came to being.
Maybe it is connected to other suns and the black hole in the center of the milky way, to exchange ideas, philosophy, or just exitement about being alive. Or preparing something we know nothing about. A meeting of galaxies.
Now I surely don't claim I know what consciousness is and I certainly do not claim the sun is. I am just hesistant to make absolute judgements about systems, where I can only catch a glimpse from the outside.
Asking why they evolved consciousness, would be the same to me as asking why the big bang happened and what was before that.
No idea, this is way beyond my understanding. But I doubt there is any human who has these insights.
So to clarify, I do not claim anything here, I just state how little we know about the grand picture and the rest is speculation, which I am aware is entering theological realms.
Theological realms are where people tend to go when they feel they must have an explanation to something unexplainable.
I think it’s important to preserve a non-theological space that allows one to acknowledge how little we know without defaulting to a theological position, and to highlight that acknowledging these unknowns does not make one a believer in deities.
Not saying this is what you’re doing by the way, but it’s a kind of binary choice that many people seem to force on the situation.
Who knows, probably more philosophical, but I think the lines can get blurry.
If a human cell, say, had intelligence comparable to that of a human, would such a cell be able to fathom the life of its “host”? Hardly.
According to Earth science, the Andromeda Galaxy is scheduled to collide with the Milky Way in around 4.5 billion years. What if all they're really doing is dancing, or about to kiss?
Imagining galaxies kissing seems utterly rooted in the biases of human experience (even other animals very close to us in evolutionary terms don’t kiss), and completely dissociated from anything we know about galaxy formation and dynamics.
We’re not quite there yet with galaxies, but there doesn’t seem to be any problem with doing explaining their motion and gravitational dynamics in principle.
This means any experience these phenomena might have would be purely epiphenomenal, and therefore lacking in consequences, or explanatory power, and be unprovable. It would be pure speculation, maybe so, maybe not, maybe something else, just an exercise in imagination. Thats not a reliable route to knowledge.
With humans we have social, emotional and intellectual behaviour predicated on the existence of personal experience. We talk and write about having interior experiences. That is a causal phenomenon in the world that needs to be explained, aside from our personal first person experience of it.
Except we do see multiple inconsistencies at a galactic scale. The hubble tension, the absence of explanation of dark matter, the models which point to 75% of fundamental components of the universe being unobservable? There doesn't seem to be a direct extrapolation from our models to galactic-scale explanations.
Consciousness is different, as we don't know how it works, but we have no evidence suggesting either that it will require a complete rewrite of fundamental physics to explain, or that a rewrite of fundamental physics to resolve the issues you raise would also provide the missing information needed to explain consciousness.
Consciousness regularly/usually claims to have omniscient knowledge of all that is, something which is not supported by physics.
Either consciousness is incorrect, or physics is, and I don't think I've ever met a physicist who believes they're incorrect on their omniscient knowledge. Seems like wherever you look in reality there are paradoxes like this that spring up, which makes me wonder what reality is.
My initial reaction to this was "not in my experience", but on reflection, I really have no idea what you are saying here. Conscious entities may have opinions, but consciousness itself, at least as it is usually conceived of, does not.
What are "you" saying here, and how do you know this to be true?
A simple search should be sufficient to establish that the most common usage of 'consciousness' is as being an aspect of perception - and more specifically, the subjective aspect of it.
Furthermore, I am at a loss to figure out how this claim could have any relevance to the sentence of mine that you quoted in your first reply to me.
And if I do not, can you still be interested?
> in my studies of what's written and said about it, I have never come across this view before.
Consider what exists now, compared to what existed at the Big Bang. Then do today vs tomorrow, also taking into consideration whether inactivity or non-exploitation of the realm of possibility plays a role.
> A simple search should be sufficient to establish that the most common usage of 'consciousness' is as being an aspect of perception - and more specifically, the subjective aspect of it.
Consider what common perception (which manifests at runtime as Truth) was of African Americans, or gay people, 30 or so years ago.
> Furthermore, I am at a loss to figure out how this claim could have any relevance to the sentence of mine that you quoted in your first reply to me.
"...but consciousness itself, at least as it is usually conceived of, does not."
It isn't possible for you to know how consciousness is commonly conceived, but your consciousness would have you believe otherwise. Consciousness is shaped by culture, and your culture has taught you to think this way, it is the proper way to think here in 2024.
Maybe an analogy would help:
Consider the aggregate (adjusted to remove affects of population size) quality & power of human cognitive capability before and after the enlightenment, comprehensively, but also with respect to a certain phenomenon: faith based thinking. Then, consider where we may currently sit on an absolute scale, and what the distribution of faith based thinking is (actually, opposed to virtually) throughout the system. How likely does it seem that humans have produced the perfect methodology, even without considering the state of affairs we see all around us?
Basically, I'm kind of asking (teasing may be a better word) that physicists, and science in general, to expand their theories to include explanations for their implicit claims of omniscience, or stop engaging in it, or at least stop taking cheap shots at and claiming (without proof or even substantial evidence) comprehensive objective superiority to other competing frameworks/methodologies/etc.
I could be, but not by this rather idiosyncratic diatribe against intellectual arrogance, a domain which is in any case far from being exclusively populated by physicists.
Could you (are you willing to, and will in fact do it) describe at least one set of conditions where you could be?
> ...but not by this rather idiosyncratic diatribe against intellectual arrogance
Can you explain why you believe this is necessarily (presumably) the case?
Meta:
- Is there a way or tone I could write in such that I could achieve the same level of logical rigour, but somehow bypass the natural, fundamental aversion to this sort of dialogue?
- Do you believe it to be optimal that you can criticize/insult my performance, but my criticism/inquiry into particular details of of yours is ~non-valid/inappropriate/etc (I am assuming something like this is the case, please correct me if I am wrong)?
The current Western approach to science is strictly that subjective measure is fully informative of objective reality, and (equally if not more importantly) that perception is a mechanism operating within objective reality, an object within reality, and that object is subject to natural laws.
The other possibility -- there is really no way to refute or prove either definitively as in all of these dual ontological choices -- is that consciousness is peering into a construct of a universal conscious intellect (something like logos or tao) and the nature of conscious intellect is entirely unlike the nature of the construct, which is an image. This flavor of paradigm offers the possibility for "consciousness" (aka God) to claim omniscient powers, including time dilation (alpha omega) and other matter.
What helps these models to persist are entirely distinct. The former maps well to shared experiences (modulo group psi phenomena) and is reassuringly direct and simple. The latter persists since it maps well to non-rational content of our minds which the former simply must dismiss as garbage collection or (LLM like) ramblings, void of meaning.
Physics can't be incorrect but it can be misinterpreted. Last century witnessed a wonderful case in point where Quantum physics provided analytical tools to "perfectly predict" outcomes of experiments but until eventually settled allowed physicists to have preferences (read: belief systems) regarding which interpretation of the quantum phenomena (Einstein or Bohr) was correct.
That Bohr's interpretation proved to be the correct interpretation has bearing on this discussion in more than one sense.
> The current Western approach to science is strictly that subjective measure is fully informative of objective reality, and (equally if not more importantly) that perception is a mechanism operating within objective reality, an object within reality, and that object is subject to natural laws.
Sometimes, sure. But science/scientists also has knowledge of Indirect Realism, but only sometimes:
- when discussing Indirect Realism from an abstract perspective
- when criticizing the object level quality of ideas other than their own (when it is their ideas the underlying service seems to become disabled, and often even access to memory is blocked)
> The other possibility...
Classic western scientific (as it is manifest at the object level) thinking: framing things as false dichotomies.
>... there is really no way to refute or prove either definitively
Disagree.
Take your perfectly reasonable (by current standards of proper thinking, [highlighting] problematic portions for emphasis): "subjective [measure] [is] [fully] [informative] of [objective] [reality], and ([equally] if not more importantly) that [perception] [is] a mechanism [operating within] [objective] [reality], an [object] [within] [reality], and that object [is] [subject to] [natural] [laws]."
This whole phenomenon takes place within reality, this "is" "true", but the content of reality (comprehensive reality at a given snapshot in time) is also the consequence of it. So while it "is true" that these mechanisms operate within "objective reality", they also produce objective reality (much of which is simultaneously subjective, objectively).
Also: while convenient techniques like "and that object is subject to natural laws" can be useful, they can also be harmful, like when one forgets that "natural laws" (and various other things within the problem space) is virtualized/hallucinated, but appears to not be (there's an easy way to tell: pick someone out of a forum and ask them questions: you will almost always find that they genuinely believe that what seems to be true to them is true; and, they'll often even link to a proof: a claim that it is true, that has no accompanying proof).
> as in all of these dual ontological choices -- is that consciousness is peering into a construct of a universal conscious intellect (something like logos or tao) and the nature of conscious intellect is entirely unlike the nature of the construct, which is an image. This flavor of paradigm offers the possibility for "consciousness" (aka God) to claim omniscient powers, including time dilation (alpha omega) and other matter.
I can see the possibility from an abstract theory perspective, but I cannot see how a complete object level implementation would be possible, even removing science's silly restrictive object level (science as it manifests) restrictions like an absence of evidence is proof of absence. (Are Godel's Incompleteness Theorems relevant here maybe?)
> What helps these models to persist are entirely distinct. The former maps well to shared experiences (modulo group psi phenomena) and is reassuringly direct and simple. The latter persists since it maps well to non-rational content of our minds which the former simply must dismiss as garbage collection or (LLM like) ramblings, void of meaning.
I think training of LLM's is much better analogy, and I also believe that that may be literally the comprehensively correct answer. If you simply pay close attention to how humans (both dumb and the very smartest) talk, if you take them at their literal word, I can't see much flaw: human belief of what is true is a function of what they were trained to believe is true. (Self-referential irony noted....in...
You sound overly confident with your statement about a topic that has eluded thinkers for millennia and (probably) millennia to come
Some are quite famous, but that’s irrelevant in the face of thousands of years of utter failure to be more than pure entertainment. Try and find any philosophical statement from all that navel gazing which both means something and is generally accepted as true.
Lao Tzu
And they don't have to adapt just to the physical world but also the other agents, which further pushes consciousness to become more sophisticated. Wait a few billion years, and here we are.
Why was self replication necessary? To gradually sculpt the consciousness hardware and record what gains it makes, copying the code into the future. The mechanisms in consciousness are the result of many small changes over time, they can't appear suddenly in one single step. Without a copying mechanism (self replication of DNA in our case) it is impossible.
> In order to compete, they need to adapt, hence they develop consciousness.
The "hence" here is not a necessary implication. Plants also compete and adapt, but they don't have consciousness. Also, they have not lost the competition with animals. As a whole, I suppose they have better chances of survival than animals.
This isn't how evolution works. Evolution is not purposeful: adaptions don't occur because adaptions are necessary for the survival of a population group's descendents. If a population doesn't change quickly enough to remain well-suited to its environment, it just dies off: extinction.
You seem to like AI, so: evolution is basically a stochastic hill-climbing algorithm. You're describing something closer to intelligent design than evolution.
Made my day
There are certainly many things, such as the specific patterning of a moth's camouflage, where a certain amount of chance is involved, and there are Gould's "spandrels" - features that exist, not for themselves, but because constraints on what is possible require them - but anything significant that makes no sense in terms of evolution would be a matter of the greatest significance in biology.
But this is beside the point here, as there is no difficulty (except perhaps self-imposed ones) in seeing the utility of consciousness.
Assuming consciousness isn't somehow necessary for intelligence or associative learning and that it plays a somewhat subserviently role to unconscious mechanisms, consciousness seems potentially less efficient than unconscious mechanisms. For example when physically avoiding a collision while driving conscious thought is often too slow.
Intuitively the role of consciousness as a supervisor of faster unconscious mechanisms seems to be to review the unconscious and perform some sort of steering or review of it. But I'm not sure it's obvious consciousness is effective at doing this.
For example in ironic process theory trying to consciously will away a thought takes resources which increases the prevalence of that thought. "Try to pose for yourself this task: not to think of a polar bear, and you will see that the cursed thing will come to mind every minute."
Some of the concerns for consciousness in a evolutionary model are better outlined here.
https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10....
At that point in its life, consciousness might not be much of a help to it, but here's a similar question: when an antelope first sees a pride of lions in the distance, could it be of evolutionary advantage for it to feel anxious? From there, we can step to an even more pertinent question: if an early human or close hominin ancestor contemplated the possibility of a pride of lions moving into their neighborhood, could it have been advantageous for them to feel anxious?
One response that does not seem far-fetched is that it might prompt the individual to think about how to defend against the threat. This would involve considering various scenarios and how they would play out. This is not just a matter of recalling past events, as these are hypothetical scenarios. Istead, it is a matter of synthesizing an imagined scenario from memories - but there is a phenomenal - 'what it is like' - aspect to memories, some combination of recalling the original phenomenal experience itself or the phenomenal experience of how one felt at the time. Any less direct association between what we experience in the world and how we think about it seems both unnecessarily complex and at risk of our imagination becoming completely detached from the world we live in.
I can't prove that this is how it works, but in this view, it is quite plausible that phenomenal consciousness was a key prerequisite for the route by which we acquired our higher mental abilities (including explicit self-awareness and a theory of mind about other people), and is necessary now. You can claim that all these abilities are possible without phenomenal experience, but even if that were so, it does not follow that phenomenal consciousness is evolutionarily impotent, as evolution can only work by small increments, so we do not see, for example, macroscopic organisms with wheels. It is not clear that there is a path to this allegedly superior mind even if it is possible.
Furthermore, if phenomenal consciousness is evolutionarily impotent and suboptimal, how did we get it, and why does it not atrophy (which is the fate of all other biological features once they are no longer advantageous)? Panpsychists want to summarily reject an incomplete hypothesis and substitute one that redefines the whole universe to make consciousness fundamental, while saying literally next to nothing about what that means, what consciousness is, and how it works.
Thanks for the reference by the way; I keep a small collection of these sorts of thing.
That is a very specific and narrow definition, biased by animal consciousness on Earth. While I am not personally aware of a definition of consciousness, I think of it as awareness and potentially some ability to act on that awareness by any method.
I'm not sure I agree here.
For starters, for all we know there is a complicated underlying order and evolution of a population of self-replicating eddy currents in the magnetohydrodynamics of plasmas in the sun or something. It's probably unlikely due to the rapid thermalization of things with that much energy in one place, but I'm not sure we can rule it out entirely.
We shouldn't limit ourselves to the typical energy, length, and time scales that are familiar to us when trying to look for consciousness or life. (And certainly not to chemistry alone, let alone carbon chemistry at temperatures and pressures near STP) The universe contains an enormous range of orders of magnitude of interesting interactions that could perhaps have a sufficiently complicated state space to support some sort of self-replicating.
In general however, I do tend to agree that any consciousness is the result of evolving self-replication.
Let's imagine that there's some kind of competition between self-regulating magneto hydrodynamic processes inside the sun.
Well, eventually an overarching consciousness arises, controlling all of the degrees of freedom that it can and evolving into a mind that can perceive the rest of the universe.
The original survival context may have been persistently recurring structures in solar convection cells, but now the being is far beyond worrying about such little matters.
It is free to probe the minds of other beings, and perhaps to perceive the rest of the universe. Perhaps it is curious and peaceful. Perhaps it is paranoid and violent, ready to fight against other star beings, ready to kill us if we ever try to do stellar level engineering.
I bet it fears nothing and just exists, since it's so far outside of the survival context that it evolved for, and has no reason to care if it lives or dies.
Just today I was thinking that perhaps ADHD is noise caused by the reverse time simulation of your brain iterating, trying to get the right details. All of the "normal people" are already reconstituted -- or, if I might boast -- low resolution details relative to the important matters of inquiry. Not that a simulation should feel self-important.
We can of course imagine whatever we want, but what does "consciousness field" mean? (Or perhaps we imagine consciousness fields in general before we imagine anything about the sun's?)
But it seems that instead everything we see is rooted in consciousness. A projection based on the combined raw inputs of our sense organs all made into this continuous experience by our brains. So when other phenomena “out there” occurs, it’s not just something we “see”, but it’s also something we are, e.g. a bird flying in the distance isn’t just “out there”, it’s rendered fully by our own minds, alongside the other processes of our brains and within the same conscious space that contains all other aspects of experience, both internal and “external”.
I’m not saying I believe the sun is conscious, but for sake of argument, let’s say it is. Whatever it means for the sun to be conscious, one could theoretically conclude that to whatever degree our thinking minds cause physically measurable phenomena, and to whatever extent that phenomena is “detectable” by or interacts with other conscious entities, some form of “communication” could occur.
But since we don’t know what consciousness is, and whether it is truly an emergent property or as some on the fringes believe, a more fundamental property of the universe, the term “consciousness field” seems mostly meaningless outside of our own first-hand subjective experience of being conscious of the world around us.
Perhaps the flood was caused by a coronal mass ejection that boiled a section of the ocean, causing extreme rains in a valley region.
Let's imagine that the consciousness field of the sun encompasses all of our minds.. so thinking about it might let us talk to it. So prayer could be real too. They can probably talk to us too, if they want to. A form of stellar transcranial magnetic simulation.
Pov: Sun Cults now have a scientific basis, baby! Let's try to make mental contact with the sun!
While there I tried to find Masca's Solar Station, an artifact created by the indigenous people of the island. They say it was probably to ask the sun god for help in times of drought.
https://second.wiki/wiki/estacic3b3n_solar_de_masca
I went there twice to find it, looking for something on a vertical rock. I found out later that it's actually carved into some rock on the ground.
If this low entropy carried by energy flows makes life possible, and life is how I get my consciousness. I'd say in a way my consciousness comes from the sun. The warmth of my skin and the qualia of my thoughts are movement perpetrated on Earth by the sun.
Edit -- also, earth due to its internal heat, and perhaps fossilized remains of those organisms that benefited from geothermal heat/vents/etc during its time (nuclear power), will one day do our work on the sun
Our star is the major, "central" (chuckle) factor in our Goldilocks existence, but Anthropomorphism is an anthropocentric game. [1]
Cyanobacteria [2] , flowering plants and pollinators would also be part of our complex Goldilocks consciousness.
Our awareness of this fragile existence should encourage us to be the best version of ourselves and enjoy every moment.
[1] _ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic_principle
[2] _ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Oxidation_Event
I don't think the article or I have made any references to anthropomorphism.
In the article: "Therefore anyone who supposes that the sun is conscious is making a childish error, projecting anthropomorphic illusions onto inanimate nature."
A paragraph that starts "s the sun conscious? Obviously not, from the point of view of mechanistic materialism or physicalism".
So I see now why you'd raise that point. Still, it is a minor throwaway figure of speech that doesn't really encapsulate what the author is discussing further in the article.
Is my partner conscious? My dog? Actually, I don't know. I can say that I experience myself as conscious.
In our daily interactions we never ask such questions. Last week, I hired a new programmer. We checked the CV and the code challenge. We invited the candidate to see how they get around with the team etc. At no point, we asked if they're conscious.
I think our brains are machines for predicting what happens next. Therefore, a large brain makes sense because it can simulate the world more precisely and make better predictions. One mistake of this simulation is that the brain simulates us as a conscious agent who can make their own decisions and act in the world. In contrast, we are just machines who operate by the laws of quantum mechanics.
Maybe evolution set up this illusion on purpose so that we don't get depressed and kill ourselves.
Technologist thinks that humans are machines (breaking news)
> Therefore, a large brain makes sense because it can simulate the world more precisely and make better predictions.
Whence consciousness?
> One mistake of this simulation is that the brain simulates us as a conscious agent who can make their own decisions and act in the world.
A mistake? Like a random mutation (consciousness) which just persisted because there was no evolutionary pressure to get rid of it?
Or did it persist in everyone? Maybe half of humanity is conscious while the other half is not? They operate exactly the same except the conscious half wastes some kilojoules fretting over awareness.
A machine doesn’t need to simulate being aware of decision-making. That’s cruft. Wasted cycles.
Maybe you’re reasoning backwards from the human-centric idea that “making decisions” requires awareness. But then you incoherently assert that humans are machines, and machines don’t need consciousness to make decisions.
> Maybe evolution set up this illusion on purpose so that we don't get depressed and kill ourselves.
So (if I am understanding correctly), consciousness was a random mutation of a complex organism. Of course someone can be conscious and not feel like they have free will. Like they are just along for the ride. But this is “depressing” somehow.[1] So now a free will illusion mutation has to occur in order to protect the machine from self-killing.
Seems convoluted.
[1] But why? 80% of the HN philosophers seem fine with it.
> Technologist thinks that humans are machines (breaking news)
While I also dismiss or at least be careful of the inherent biases of technocratic viewpoints, humans and life in general are very much made of many types of machines.
Take a look at these videos:
https://youtu.be/wJyUtbn0O5Y
https://youtu.be/7Hk9jct2ozY
I.e., life is insane and bewildering.