It really shows how a lot of who we are is unconscious and happening without us being aware.
hvs 5 days ago [-]
A related book that I found interesting is "The Ego Tunnel" by Thomas Metzinger [1]. He's a philosopher but also brings in current (for 2010) neuroscience research into the study of consciousness and the feeling of a "self".
> The main thesis of the book is that we are very often not aware of our real reasons for most of our behaviours. Our behaviors are optimised for living in a social group and very often, from the point of view of natural selection, it is useful if we are not consciously aware of our real motivations. [1]
That’s sounds interesting. Thanks for sharing this.
soderfoo 5 days ago [-]
Just to confirm: this paper focuses on the 'awakeness' aspect of consciousness, not self-awareness, correct?
My science literacy is lacking.
Personally, I find self-awareness the more fascinating area of study, but any brain research pretty fascinating.
denton-scratch 5 days ago [-]
> Just to confirm: this paper focuses on the 'awakeness' aspect of consciousness, not self-awareness
That's how I read it. I'm interested in consciousness, but neither in terms of "self-awareness" or of "awakeness". Awakeness just means you aren't asleep. The term "self-awareness" implies awareness, which might be what's meant by consciousness, and it assumes there's a Self, which is a metaphysical concept, not susceptible to scientific invetigation.
DEADMINCE 7 hours ago [-]
> The term "self-awareness" implies awareness, which might be what's meant by consciousness
Well, most animals have awareness, but not self-awareness.
> there's a Self, which is a metaphysical concept, not susceptible to scientific invetigation.
That doesn't seem to be true at all. The idea of a self is very testable.
HarHarVeryFunny 5 days ago [-]
Objectively self-awareness is just inner-awareness vs outer-awareness - what you might consider as another sense, but where the sensory inputs are parts of the brain rather than external (eye, ear, etc). So, the watcher and the watched are both the same - the brain.
The "self" is just a psychological construct - the actor behind our actions, which in fact is just the brain. This is just the way our brain has evolved to understand/predict an evolutionary landscape full of autonomous agents, who we need to model to predict their behavior. There's no fundamental difference between "self" (my-self) and "you" (your-self) - our brain observes some (inner or outer) entity as a causal entity, and models it.
5 days ago [-]
coldtea 5 days ago [-]
>and it assumes there's a Self, which is a metaphysical concept, not susceptible to scientific invetigation.
I don't think this is correct.
Not only because metaphysical concepts can still be suscpeptible to scientific investigation (as can e.g. time, reality, and so on. For example for reality "do we live in a simulation" could be something some scientists do try to determine), and because some metaphysical concepts just turned into practical concepts this way.
But also because self-awareness and the concept of self can be defined in quite practical terms too (e.g. a higher level loop on top of regular thinking referencing the lower level, or similar ideas like in Hofstadter).
NayamAmarshe 5 days ago [-]
Time is not exclusively a metaphysical concept, the perception of time is.
Reality, again is a very vague word in physics. One definition is, real is that which always is, not that which is not. Material nature is subject to constant change, there is nothing in the material universe that is immovable, unchanging and eternally static and stable.
Eastern philosophy describes the reality as the 'Self', the self is eternally existing without a causation but this Self, the observer, requires an observation and hence the concept of material nature comes into place to justify the existence of the observer but the Self is mutually exclusive to the material nature. The Self is not an manifestation of the material nature, otherwise it would be ever changing, like material nature.
For science to explain consciousness, it has to drop the idea of a controlled experiment. You cannot empirically verify certain thing to be true, this is what metaphysics is for.
glenstein 5 days ago [-]
Made the point better than I could. Also I would just contribute that a long line of anti-science apologism has taken the form of declaring that certain concepts are beyond the reach of scientific investigation. Evolution, human nature as understood in evolutionary terms, orbital mechanics past a certain point of Newtonian modeling, anaesthesia, etc.
denton-scratch 5 days ago [-]
> But also because self-awareness and the concept of self can be defined in quite practical terms too (e.g. a higher level loop on top of regular thinking referencing the lower level, or similar ideas like in Hofstadter).
I treasure my dog-eared copy of GEB. Having said that, Hofstadter sets out to argue for a "emergent phenomenon" explanation of consciousness, and I don't think his "loops within loops" argument works. It's not really an argument; it's finger-painting. He's trying to point in the direction of an argument (which is fine, even admirable; GEB is almost entirely concerned with allusion and suggestion. It's supposed to make you ask questions).
It's quite easy to argue that the idea of a self (or the sense of being a self) is emergent, or an illusion; it's much harder to explain "idea" and "sense" in those terms, unless you resort to non-conscious[0] senses and non-conscious ideas.
Basically, I agree that you can explain everything in terms of emergent phenonemena, except the subjectivity of consciousness/awareness. We experience it directly, we know it's real (it's the only thing we know!), and nobody has come up with a way of showing that it's real, or even saying what it is, or how we could show it's real. Dougie's loops are just a distraction.
[0] I say "non-conscious" rather than "unconscious" because I don't want Freudian woo to intrude.
raincom 5 days ago [-]
Self-awareness = awareness of oneself. The moment one thinks, feels in terms of "I think, I feel, I see, I hear, etc".
denton-scratch 5 days ago [-]
Yes, of course. I think I was suggesting that "awareness" and "consciousness" could be considered to be synonyms. If that's correct, then you can't use self-awareness as evidence of consciousness, because it begs the question (i.e. circular reasoning).
raincom 4 days ago [-]
You are correct. To me, consciousness and awareness are interchangeable.
DEADMINCE 7 hours ago [-]
A fly is aware and conscious. It is not self-aware, nor does it likely have a consciousness.
Symmetry 5 days ago [-]
Right, and not qualia either.
I'ts a bit more complicated than just awakeness, though. If you flash an image on a screen for a very short period of time, you won't ever be able to remember what it said or be able to tell someone what it said, but it can still have a slight effect on your behavior for about a second. There is information that are senses are providing to our brain that never makes it to conscious awareness.
Sometimes people have brain injuries that prevent the transfer of information from some parts of their brain to their consciousness. Someone with blindsight has an injury that prevents them from being consciously, in this sense, aware of their visual field. They can still pick up items in front of them when asked. But they can't describe what is in front of them, and if the close their eyes they can't remember where something is and still pick it up like a normal person can.
I'd highly recommend Consciousness and the Brain for an in-dpeth look at research in this area.
glenstein 5 days ago [-]
Right, and I think the key here is that we should be ready to see key elements we believe are necessary for conscious to be distributed across numerous systems, rather than uncovering a singular unitary thing. And so it's not a matter of "oh, this study only found XXX but it didn't find consciousness".
But it might be that the process of coming to full empirical understanding is that we take an idea that used to be black-boxed, and open it up to find numerous particular mechanisms, numerous layers. Kind of like how originally we thought there was one Vitamin B but then came to learn there were numerous subclasses that were different in important ways.
Symmetry 5 days ago [-]
That's true, but its also true that some connections might be reasonably said to be key for sensory information to find its way into working memory so I wouldn't dismiss the title.
rytill 5 days ago [-]
Why do you find self-awareness to be the more fascinating area of study? It makes complete sense that something could be self-aware if it could be aware of anything at all. What more do you need to research/understand about self-awareness?
It is far more interesting to me that there is “awakeness” to experience than that we can be aware of our selves (in the same way we can be aware of anything else).
A complete understanding of sentience including its causes would be a far more satisfying and ethically impactful body of knowledge than a complete understanding of self-awareness (assuming they are not inextricably linked somehow).
DEADMINCE 7 hours ago [-]
Awareness is just the basic state of most animal life, it has to be for it to function. It isn't particularly more interesting than a venus fly trap.
Self-awareness is something altogether different. The ability to look inward and analyze oneself, to effect the environment rather than just be a part of it...these are massive departures from the norm, responsible for everything that makes humanity great and terrible.
How could that not be the more fascinating area to study?
b800h 5 days ago [-]
Yep. It does frustrate me that they use the term this way.
nicklecompte 5 days ago [-]
In the past we used the word "sentience" for this, but sci-fi confused "sentience" with "sapience," and now we have four terms that are meaningless, causing pointless arguments because different people interpret them in different ways.
- consciousness
- sentience
- self-awareness
- sapience
(It really doesn't help that 3/4 these are too poorly-understood to even have a good formal definition.)
glenstein 5 days ago [-]
I'm okay to live and let live and not litigate differences here as long as usage is meaningful and contributes to precision (although it would be perfectly fair to insist that's exactly what's being lost here).
I understand, for instance, that for some people there's an important difference between morality and ethics, but modern scholarship in meta-ethics that is perfectly up to speed on this vocabulary sees no benefit to policing that particular distinction.
5 days ago [-]
glenstein 5 days ago [-]
>Personally, I find self-awareness the more fascinating area of study
I know what you mean by that, and fundamentally I agree with the basic idea. But (!!!) I don't think the idea of self awareness is nearly so critical as its made out to be, and I think it gets conflated with the other thing, described as the something-its-like-to-be (SILTB) quality.
I think outward, worldly awareness is enough, and whether or not a 'self' is among the things that fall into awareness (1) isn't strictly necessary, as that self might be backgrounded and unconscious, and (2) is sometimes just adopted as phrasing to indicate the presence of the SILTB quality even though I don't think it necessarily has anything to do with that.
taneq 5 days ago [-]
That’s my reading, arousal/somnolence as opposed to being insensate vs. sentience.
m3kw9 5 days ago [-]
One can be awake and still not be conscious
groestl 5 days ago [-]
Obligatory book recommendation in that regard "I Am a Strange Loop", by Douglas R. Hofstadter
librasteve 5 days ago [-]
afaict this is novel research that has found a “default application loop(?)” in our brains that is associated with being awake … and differs from goal oriented states - i have wondered if/when such an inner loop would be found since it is quite easy to turn consciousness on/off (sleep, anaesthetics, drugs ymmv) and then fMRI can be used to find differentiated activity patterns. This is pretty good evidence that Panpsychism is bollocks, if you needed it.
loafer-project 5 days ago [-]
Interesting find on the "default application loop," but it hardly debunks panpsychism. Panpsychism suggests that all matter has proto-conscious traits, not just brain-like consciousness. The brain patterns we're identifying with fMRI are just how human consciousness manifests, based on our specific neural setups. This doesn't necessarily exclude other forms of consciousness inherent in different forms of matter, which might be beyond our current detection capabilities. Let's not conflate our present understanding of human consciousness with the broader, philosophical nature of consciousness itself.
glenstein 5 days ago [-]
>Panpsychism suggests that all matter has proto-conscious traits, not just brain-like consciousness.
I think a cornerstone of panpsychism is that none of the concepts presently available to any physicalist explanation is sufficient or on the horizon, therefore it is necessary to entertain such ideas as a universe-spanning proto-consciousness.
I find this position to be pre-emptive, not in the spirit of scientific open mindedness, not compatible with any research program that could prove or disprove it, and completely emptyhanded in any conversation that seeks to understand consciousness in functional or structural terms as well as completely emptyhanded in even beginning to explain the combination problem.
Until it gets its act together and gets out of alpha-testing, I fault pansychism proponents for bringing a "teach the controversy" approach to a table of scientific investigation at which they are yet to have earned a seat.
altruios 5 days ago [-]
I mean, experiments should be able to test this? Maybe in the future someone will find a way to adapt the double slit experiment to test for 'choice' on a fundamental particle level. "Can a particle choose for itself?"
glenstein 5 days ago [-]
That's a very creative potential experiment, and I do hope some such experiments can be proposed!
However, my understanding of the double slit experiment is that the "observer" in the experiment means something more like measurer or measurability, which can be done by devices. And it shouldn't be construed as being deeply tied to consciousness in philosophically important sense.
altruios 5 days ago [-]
My understanding was 'measuring is touching' with light, imparting energy into the delicate system, and no measurement can be done at that scale (thanks to the rules of light frequency/energy) that can both detect it and be weak enough to not bother the result.
So when I say like the double slit needs to be adapted, it would need to account for such. It would need to test for 'choice' from a particle... somehow...
Or... maybe randomness as a concept is flawed. Maybe randomness === '(some level of informed?) choice' from particles we are not privy too. not some 'hidden variable' but a dynamic ability to 'choose'?
How would we prove random is random and not a choice/decision we can't see or understand?
BlueTemplar 5 days ago [-]
Supposedly Bell's inequality means there are no hidden variables (or implies even weirder things) ?
altruios 20 hours ago [-]
I am not talking about 'hidden variables'. More like... 'hidden (unfound as of yet) functions'...
tasty_freeze 5 days ago [-]
Panpsychism is as necessary to explain consciousness. Why can't it (and qualia) just be emergent behaviors?
We might as well posit pancandleness in order to explain the candleness of candles. Without such a thing, why call a candle a candle? It would merely be just a temporary arrangement of molecules.
anon291 1 days ago [-]
Being a candle is different than the sensation that one is a candle. Indeed, yes, i think it's reasonable to posit, that, if such a sensation exists, then all things would feel it in some way, depending on how much of a candle you are.
tasty_freeze 12 hours ago [-]
My point is this: we put labels on things, but it doesn't mean there isn't some independent thing we can point to that causes it to be that thing. There is no candleness that imbues an object to make it a candle.
Likewise, a feeling of red isn't due to some mysterious redness. It is just the label we put on a particular configuration of neural activation. No need to make it mysterious until someone shows that more is required to explain it.
anon291 1 hours ago [-]
> Likewise, a feeling of red isn't due to some mysterious redness. It is just the label we put on a particular configuration of neural activation. No need to make it mysterious until someone shows that more is required to explain it.
Well... that's the problem no one can 'show' it, but we all know the feeling of 'redness'(mysterious or not, caused by neural activations alone or not) is still fundamentally different from the knowledge that red light is shining on another object. And that's the problem.
I mean, maybe you don't experience this feeling and I'm truly talking to an automaton (hello!). But I can't honestly take these claims seriously when it's extremely obvious to me that the feeling of seeing red is fundamentally different from the pure information content that red light is shining on my face. It's a fundamental feeling of sensation that is simply inexplicable.
Why does red feel anything at all. Why is there a conscious (whatever that even is) experience of red. Wouldn't the universe work fine if it's all just automata (however intelligent). Why is there a feeling of existence at all. Is that necessary for the universe. Why? Waving these questions away as 'not mysterious' is either due to laziness or a fundamental difference in experience (which would be fascinating on its own, but I have no idea how to approach methodologicaly).
nathan_compton 5 days ago [-]
My problem with panpsychism is that its scientifically vacuous. A brain is conscious in an obvious, observable way. An equivalent amount of sand is not. We need an account of why the brain behaves the way that it does, but panpsychism furnishes no such account and the content of that accounting would basically be neuroscience as we know it, including all the philosophical difficulties of why things feel like things at all (this, I feel, is also vacuous, but a different question). Thus panpsychism is of no help at all for explaining anything so what precisely is the point of believing it?
glenstein 5 days ago [-]
I also think that once you prod for explanations of combination, or why consciousness seems to be deeply associated with a specific kind of structural function and complexity rather than such things as size and mass, panyschist answers about where consciousness "shows up" just start to more closely approximate ordinary consciousness research we are already doing.
llamaimperative 5 days ago [-]
1. You’re definitely still conscious when you’re asleep — dreams are certainly conscious experiences
2. We don’t actually know what the internal subjective state of apparently-unconscious people are e.g. in drug-induced states
Even if all of that were different, it still is not a disproof of panpsychism.
glenstein 5 days ago [-]
>You’re definitely still conscious when you’re asleep — dreams are certainly conscious experiences
I would say yes and no. I think we all feel there's something different about wakeful consciousness vs sleeping consciousness, and also, it seems that we are indeed sometimes "out cold" and that something like an "activation loop" (new term to me) might be necessary to play a role in distinguishing these various states.
ryan69howard 5 days ago [-]
> I would say yes and no.
Why would you say that? Why can't you say "I don't fully agree".
2snakes 5 days ago [-]
Right. If we weren't conscious we wouldn't know we had slept. It is an experience of nothingness.
tshaddox 5 days ago [-]
> If we weren't conscious we wouldn't know we had slept.
How do you figure? It’s not uncommon to fall asleep, wake up, and be convinced that you never fell asleep even when people next to you tell you that you were unresponsive, snoring, talking in your sleep, etc.
2snakes 5 days ago [-]
There is a difference between what is experienced in the mind and consciousness. What you're describing are aspects of emptiness (and content or lack of content) as experienced by the mind waking/dreaming/deepsleep. But consciousness / Atman is always aware and awake.
exe34 5 days ago [-]
That's a new use of the word "conscious" for me. How do you personally define consciousness?
llamaimperative 5 days ago [-]
Internal subjective experience. To “have” a point of view, not in the argumentative/opinion sense but in the “there is experience being experienced” sense.
exe34 5 days ago [-]
What does it mean to have a point of view? Does a kalman filter qualify? Why not?
llamaimperative 5 days ago [-]
I’ve never been a Kalman filter so I have no idea.
The thing that is inscrutable to me by virtue of not having been a Kalman filter myself is what I’m referring to as “point of view.”
I don’t really know that anything or anyone at all is conscious (except for me), but it sure seems like lots of other things are, based on the way they behave.
exe34 5 days ago [-]
So for some things, you are happy to watch the way they behave and assume they have this magical property of consciousness like yourself, but for a kalman filter, you'd have to be one to determine if it has a point of view?
You still haven't said what a point of view is in this context, if you can have it, and some other unspecified beings have it but you can't say upfront if a kalman filter has it.
llamaimperative 5 days ago [-]
There’s nothing incoherent here. Whether talking about a human, a dog, or a Kalman filter, the only mechanism by which I can infer (not fully determine) whether it’s conscious is by observing its behavior. Some things behave in ways that look more conscious than other things. Motor control, goal-seeking behavior, and doing things that imply self-awareness all point in the “probably conscious” direction, but none is dispositive. Other humans certainly give the appearance of being conscious while Kalman filters don’t appear that way. But you can imagine a totally believable robot (a la Westworld) that behaves outwardly identical to a conscious human but is not conscious. We don’t know enough about consciousness to determine whether it actually is or actually isn’t, which also applies to the Kalman filter question: it doesn’t appear to be conscious (unlike the robot) but we don’t have a way to determine whether it is (like the robot).
I’ve said multiple times what a point of view is, I think you’re just too caught up in argumentation to read the text in front of you.
You agree that you have experiences, correct? Your ability to experience experiences is what it means to have a POV. The name of that characteristic is “consciousness.”
It is probably the case that some objects experience experiences (like you presumably do and I definitely do), and other objects do not.
exe34 5 days ago [-]
> and I definitely do
Prove it.
llamaimperative 5 days ago [-]
Are you trying to make my argument for me? Because that's my argument.
exe34 5 days ago [-]
No I get the impression you really want to say qualia, but don't want the backlash.
llamaimperative 5 days ago [-]
What would the backlash be? Has “qualia” fallen out of favor among people who think being asleep == not being conscious? Frankly given that opening confusion I am surprised you’ve heard the word qualia.
exe34 4 days ago [-]
Qualia is magical thinking. It implicitly assumes a Cartesian theater, and leads to infinite regress.
llamaimperative 4 days ago [-]
And yet here I am having continuous, direct interaction with subjective experience and yet I have zero evidence for a Cartesian theatre… simply claiming one implies the other is not the same as proving it.
exe34 4 days ago [-]
> with subjective experience
So you claim. I can prompt an LLM to do the same.
llamaimperative 4 days ago [-]
Correct, you have no way to verify my claims, which is exactly my argument. Thanks!
exe34 4 days ago [-]
It's like playing chess with a pigeon. My fault really.
llamaimperative 4 days ago [-]
Haha, indeed :)
BlueTemplar 5 days ago [-]
My own concern is more about how Dualists can justify their metaphysics, and where does consciousness stops when considering less complex systems than humans. (Also aggregations of systems, like a country !)
bschmidt1 5 days ago [-]
It's always exciting when new correlates are discovered, but this doesn't really uncover anything about consciousness per se. At least not as classified by David Chalmers and others who use the term The Hard Problem of Consciousness - which seems to show that consciousness is impossible to understand in our current paradigm. Understand meaning - to the point we could reproduce it.
The Hard Problem is contrasted with the so-called Easy Problems - which are still very hard to solve, and many of them still aren't - but they are ultimately of a class of solvable problems, like neural correlates, the role of dopaminergic pathways, and so-on. These everyday neurological findings are needed to make progress toward understanding the brain, but they don't really have anything to do with consciousness.
Some definitions:
let intelligence mean the acquisition and understanding of knowledge
let self mean who you refer to when you say "I" or "me"
let consciousness mean raw sensations/happenings: *the aroma of coffee*, *the taste of chocolate*, *the sound of a drop of water*
Intelligence and selfhood fall under the Easy Problems - both philosophically and neurologically. We have machines that for all intents and purposes are intelligent. Even though it's not perfect, we know what kind of problem that is and how to solve it mechanistically. While nobody has invented a true "self" yet, if we ever find out exactly what conscious experiences are, scaffolding those experiences with self/identity becomes an organizational task (an Easy Problem). Still a very hard one involving neural correlates, cortical pathways, etc. from which we may derive new algorithms and paradigms, but ultimately solvable.
So that leaves the mystery of raw experiences ("the aroma of coffee") which do not seem solvable in any scientific sense. You could say that a digital camera that detects faces in its viewfinder is intelligent, but it doesn't "see" the face, we know that it only unconsciously "detects" the face. So a mystery arises when we examine the human eye, because we see basically the same hardware as the camera: Lens (lens), sensor (retina), wire (optic nerve), chip (visual cortex). Even after mapping the entire visual cortex to all visual features, it just doesn't get us any closer to understanding that raw experience of "sight" that happens when you look at something. It's not the same thing.
I applaud all progress toward understanding the brain, and sometimes wonder why the whole of humanity are not all focused on solving problems like death and aging (by way of solving consciousness), as it seems like pretty much the most important possible thing to all of us!
Favorites on the topic: Donald Hoffman, John Searle, David Chalmers, Dan Dennett, Colin McGinn, Susan Blackmore, Sam Harris.
qudat 5 days ago [-]
I'm of the opinion that the thalamo-coritcal loop, combined with chaotic brain activity, and randomness, give rise to consciousness. The "hard" problem is only hard when we put consciousness on a pedestal. If we have learned anything from LLMs it's that some clever statistics and data compression which predicts the next word can give rise to complex and seemingly "intelligent" behavior. LLMs are not conscious, but they lift the veil of our conceit. There's no hard problem of consciousness, it's an artifact of a chaotic thalamo-cortical loop that recursively processes inputs -- including outputs from previous neuronal activity.
Has nothing to do with a pedestal, it's a scientific observation.
> a chaotic thalamo-cortical loop
The aroma of coffee is not explained by the words "chaotic thalamo-cortical loop" - those are words used to loosely describe which neurons activate when I experience the aroma of coffee, but they are not the aroma of coffee, and there's no proof that they are even causal to that experience. It's a logical fallacy because many correlations are not causes but effects, and some are entirely unrelated. Example:
The green stoplight correlates with cars driving, but they don't cause a car to drive. No amount of learning about stoplights will teach you about how a car moves. From far away you simply noticed that the green light is loosely correlated with the cars moving, but that's all you know. That's what is meant by the phrase correlation is not causation - "False Cause Fallacy".
LLMs have nothing to do with consciousness, that's artificial intelligence which as I defined above is not the same as having a sensation. Intelligence (and selfhood, and other psychiatry) are all happening within the conscious process, they shouldn't be conflated with it.
> There's no hard problem of consciousness
If there's no problem - meaning, it's well-understood to the point you can reproduce it - then why has nobody been successful at producing it in isolation? The answer is, we don't know what consciousness is to the point we can reproduce it.
To deny consciousness outright is to deny the first-person observation that you're having right now. Empirical science is based on observational evidence, and there is observational evidence of an experience from your perspective - the fact of your experiential existence owes a grokable explanation - even if it is caused by or correlated with neurons in brains.
mpartel 5 days ago [-]
> Even after mapping the entire visual cortex to all visual features, it just doesn't get us any closer to understanding that raw experience of "sight" that happens when you look at something. It's not the same thing.
Seems plausible that a detailed enough mapping of correlates one day uncovers a single thing/feature/location/architecure/pattern/whatever that is present only when qualia are, and absent in all other processes. That would at least point us in a concrete direction.
bschmidt1 5 days ago [-]
Yeah but that's like saying what propels a car forward is a green stoplight, it's just a correlation you can observe that could have nothing to do with it - might not even be indirectly causal.
When you think deeply about the Hard Problem, it's really The Impossible Problem because there's no way to solve it within our subject:object and "self" paradigms. Yet the problem persists.
Take something like the memory of the first time I tied my shoes - maybe you can find the exact neuronal correlations to that experience I have when I think of that, but they won't be that memory, nor do they even give up the ingredients to engineer that in some alternate setting. The memory itself seems like a completely different phenomenon that the neurons (themselves, concepts in consciousness) can never explain on their own.
justanotherjoe 4 days ago [-]
Qualia is not that hard to me to explain when you consider that the outside world as you experienced it, is just a mental representation. A very faithful one, but still just a mapping. Why there is seeming dichotomy between the inner and outside world in terms of quality can be attributed to how the brain compartmentalized it. Both are in your head. This is qualia of the brain, how its seemingly apart from the 'real' world is because it's made so, because it's useful. So in short, it's as simple as 'the brain make some transformations to the signal'. I find that acceptable.
How about the real real outside world? We don't know it. No one knows the thing in itself. So far, to see the world you have to be embedded in it and see something from a specific POV.
Why there is at all consciousness, idk. Why not? Consciousness seems functional... because humans can't really do anything while unconscious. So it seems to me very much part of evolution.
bschmidt1 4 days ago [-]
Yes it exists and is probably some biological product of evolution, but the brain is apparently not like a heart that pumps, or a lung that is essentially a bag that pulls oxygen out of air, it's doing something else that isn't explained using any mechanical analogy (AKA the materialist worldview).
In materialism everything we know is machines and mechanisms: From atoms to trees to buildings. It works for explaining most things, but maybe there are some things that aren't machine-like, leaving us with no way to understand it (at least not using those concepts).
Think of it like - you can program a computer to do all kinds of things, but it will never "feel pain" because that is a totally different class of phenomenon that we have no idea how to produce - no amount of code will ever make pain or joy happen to the computer - it's not a code problem. "Feeling of pain" etc. are the primitives of our experience, these little experiences add up to make up our lives and selves, but we have no idea what they are or how to produce them. We only know adjacent physical things that happen alongside it like neurons firing - which not only doesn't even begin to explain it directly but is itself a concept of the consciousness machine we're trying to explain.
akomtu 4 days ago [-]
A human body can be in a zombie state while doing something. So a human can do something while unconscious, although we may rightfully call such a body not a real human. Conscious experience begins when that human connects to his body.
absent mindedness is still conscious tho. And sleepwalking is not the level of function im talking. You can't do your job while sleepwalking. I'm not convinced humans can do intelligent work without being conscious. No such states that i've seen anyways.
mpartel 5 days ago [-]
I agree in the sense that answering "what really are qualia" may be as impossible as answering "what really are quantum fields". At some point we may be forced to accept "it just is", but that doesn't mean we can't make meaningful progress first, just like in physics.
For instance, either new physics is involved or it isn't. Finding solid evidence for or against it does not seem impossible, and it would definitely constitute meaningful progress, at the very least by ruling some theories out.
plokiju 4 days ago [-]
I think the difference with qualia is that it has so many ethical implications too.
I can accept that I have inner experiences and can suffer, but what about animals/robots/outsiders?
Will I need to take GPT-10's feelings into account, or is it completely unconscious?
4 days ago [-]
Rendered at 16:35:03 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
It really shows how a lot of who we are is unconscious and happening without us being aware.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Ego-Tunnel-Science-Mind-Myth/dp/04650...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consciousness_Explained
> The main thesis of the book is that we are very often not aware of our real reasons for most of our behaviours. Our behaviors are optimised for living in a social group and very often, from the point of view of natural selection, it is useful if we are not consciously aware of our real motivations. [1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Elephant_in_the_Brain
My science literacy is lacking.
Personally, I find self-awareness the more fascinating area of study, but any brain research pretty fascinating.
That's how I read it. I'm interested in consciousness, but neither in terms of "self-awareness" or of "awakeness". Awakeness just means you aren't asleep. The term "self-awareness" implies awareness, which might be what's meant by consciousness, and it assumes there's a Self, which is a metaphysical concept, not susceptible to scientific invetigation.
Well, most animals have awareness, but not self-awareness.
> there's a Self, which is a metaphysical concept, not susceptible to scientific invetigation.
That doesn't seem to be true at all. The idea of a self is very testable.
The "self" is just a psychological construct - the actor behind our actions, which in fact is just the brain. This is just the way our brain has evolved to understand/predict an evolutionary landscape full of autonomous agents, who we need to model to predict their behavior. There's no fundamental difference between "self" (my-self) and "you" (your-self) - our brain observes some (inner or outer) entity as a causal entity, and models it.
I don't think this is correct.
Not only because metaphysical concepts can still be suscpeptible to scientific investigation (as can e.g. time, reality, and so on. For example for reality "do we live in a simulation" could be something some scientists do try to determine), and because some metaphysical concepts just turned into practical concepts this way.
But also because self-awareness and the concept of self can be defined in quite practical terms too (e.g. a higher level loop on top of regular thinking referencing the lower level, or similar ideas like in Hofstadter).
Reality, again is a very vague word in physics. One definition is, real is that which always is, not that which is not. Material nature is subject to constant change, there is nothing in the material universe that is immovable, unchanging and eternally static and stable.
Eastern philosophy describes the reality as the 'Self', the self is eternally existing without a causation but this Self, the observer, requires an observation and hence the concept of material nature comes into place to justify the existence of the observer but the Self is mutually exclusive to the material nature. The Self is not an manifestation of the material nature, otherwise it would be ever changing, like material nature.
For science to explain consciousness, it has to drop the idea of a controlled experiment. You cannot empirically verify certain thing to be true, this is what metaphysics is for.
I treasure my dog-eared copy of GEB. Having said that, Hofstadter sets out to argue for a "emergent phenomenon" explanation of consciousness, and I don't think his "loops within loops" argument works. It's not really an argument; it's finger-painting. He's trying to point in the direction of an argument (which is fine, even admirable; GEB is almost entirely concerned with allusion and suggestion. It's supposed to make you ask questions).
It's quite easy to argue that the idea of a self (or the sense of being a self) is emergent, or an illusion; it's much harder to explain "idea" and "sense" in those terms, unless you resort to non-conscious[0] senses and non-conscious ideas.
Basically, I agree that you can explain everything in terms of emergent phenonemena, except the subjectivity of consciousness/awareness. We experience it directly, we know it's real (it's the only thing we know!), and nobody has come up with a way of showing that it's real, or even saying what it is, or how we could show it's real. Dougie's loops are just a distraction.
[0] I say "non-conscious" rather than "unconscious" because I don't want Freudian woo to intrude.
I'ts a bit more complicated than just awakeness, though. If you flash an image on a screen for a very short period of time, you won't ever be able to remember what it said or be able to tell someone what it said, but it can still have a slight effect on your behavior for about a second. There is information that are senses are providing to our brain that never makes it to conscious awareness.
Sometimes people have brain injuries that prevent the transfer of information from some parts of their brain to their consciousness. Someone with blindsight has an injury that prevents them from being consciously, in this sense, aware of their visual field. They can still pick up items in front of them when asked. But they can't describe what is in front of them, and if the close their eyes they can't remember where something is and still pick it up like a normal person can.
I'd highly recommend Consciousness and the Brain for an in-dpeth look at research in this area.
But it might be that the process of coming to full empirical understanding is that we take an idea that used to be black-boxed, and open it up to find numerous particular mechanisms, numerous layers. Kind of like how originally we thought there was one Vitamin B but then came to learn there were numerous subclasses that were different in important ways.
It is far more interesting to me that there is “awakeness” to experience than that we can be aware of our selves (in the same way we can be aware of anything else).
A complete understanding of sentience including its causes would be a far more satisfying and ethically impactful body of knowledge than a complete understanding of self-awareness (assuming they are not inextricably linked somehow).
Self-awareness is something altogether different. The ability to look inward and analyze oneself, to effect the environment rather than just be a part of it...these are massive departures from the norm, responsible for everything that makes humanity great and terrible.
How could that not be the more fascinating area to study?
- consciousness
- sentience
- self-awareness
- sapience
(It really doesn't help that 3/4 these are too poorly-understood to even have a good formal definition.)
I understand, for instance, that for some people there's an important difference between morality and ethics, but modern scholarship in meta-ethics that is perfectly up to speed on this vocabulary sees no benefit to policing that particular distinction.
I know what you mean by that, and fundamentally I agree with the basic idea. But (!!!) I don't think the idea of self awareness is nearly so critical as its made out to be, and I think it gets conflated with the other thing, described as the something-its-like-to-be (SILTB) quality.
I think outward, worldly awareness is enough, and whether or not a 'self' is among the things that fall into awareness (1) isn't strictly necessary, as that self might be backgrounded and unconscious, and (2) is sometimes just adopted as phrasing to indicate the presence of the SILTB quality even though I don't think it necessarily has anything to do with that.
I think a cornerstone of panpsychism is that none of the concepts presently available to any physicalist explanation is sufficient or on the horizon, therefore it is necessary to entertain such ideas as a universe-spanning proto-consciousness.
I find this position to be pre-emptive, not in the spirit of scientific open mindedness, not compatible with any research program that could prove or disprove it, and completely emptyhanded in any conversation that seeks to understand consciousness in functional or structural terms as well as completely emptyhanded in even beginning to explain the combination problem.
Until it gets its act together and gets out of alpha-testing, I fault pansychism proponents for bringing a "teach the controversy" approach to a table of scientific investigation at which they are yet to have earned a seat.
However, my understanding of the double slit experiment is that the "observer" in the experiment means something more like measurer or measurability, which can be done by devices. And it shouldn't be construed as being deeply tied to consciousness in philosophically important sense.
So when I say like the double slit needs to be adapted, it would need to account for such. It would need to test for 'choice' from a particle... somehow...
Or... maybe randomness as a concept is flawed. Maybe randomness === '(some level of informed?) choice' from particles we are not privy too. not some 'hidden variable' but a dynamic ability to 'choose'?
How would we prove random is random and not a choice/decision we can't see or understand?
We might as well posit pancandleness in order to explain the candleness of candles. Without such a thing, why call a candle a candle? It would merely be just a temporary arrangement of molecules.
Likewise, a feeling of red isn't due to some mysterious redness. It is just the label we put on a particular configuration of neural activation. No need to make it mysterious until someone shows that more is required to explain it.
Well... that's the problem no one can 'show' it, but we all know the feeling of 'redness'(mysterious or not, caused by neural activations alone or not) is still fundamentally different from the knowledge that red light is shining on another object. And that's the problem.
I mean, maybe you don't experience this feeling and I'm truly talking to an automaton (hello!). But I can't honestly take these claims seriously when it's extremely obvious to me that the feeling of seeing red is fundamentally different from the pure information content that red light is shining on my face. It's a fundamental feeling of sensation that is simply inexplicable.
Why does red feel anything at all. Why is there a conscious (whatever that even is) experience of red. Wouldn't the universe work fine if it's all just automata (however intelligent). Why is there a feeling of existence at all. Is that necessary for the universe. Why? Waving these questions away as 'not mysterious' is either due to laziness or a fundamental difference in experience (which would be fascinating on its own, but I have no idea how to approach methodologicaly).
2. We don’t actually know what the internal subjective state of apparently-unconscious people are e.g. in drug-induced states
Even if all of that were different, it still is not a disproof of panpsychism.
I would say yes and no. I think we all feel there's something different about wakeful consciousness vs sleeping consciousness, and also, it seems that we are indeed sometimes "out cold" and that something like an "activation loop" (new term to me) might be necessary to play a role in distinguishing these various states.
Why would you say that? Why can't you say "I don't fully agree".
How do you figure? It’s not uncommon to fall asleep, wake up, and be convinced that you never fell asleep even when people next to you tell you that you were unresponsive, snoring, talking in your sleep, etc.
The thing that is inscrutable to me by virtue of not having been a Kalman filter myself is what I’m referring to as “point of view.”
I don’t really know that anything or anyone at all is conscious (except for me), but it sure seems like lots of other things are, based on the way they behave.
You still haven't said what a point of view is in this context, if you can have it, and some other unspecified beings have it but you can't say upfront if a kalman filter has it.
I’ve said multiple times what a point of view is, I think you’re just too caught up in argumentation to read the text in front of you.
You agree that you have experiences, correct? Your ability to experience experiences is what it means to have a POV. The name of that characteristic is “consciousness.”
It is probably the case that some objects experience experiences (like you presumably do and I definitely do), and other objects do not.
Prove it.
So you claim. I can prompt an LLM to do the same.
The Hard Problem is contrasted with the so-called Easy Problems - which are still very hard to solve, and many of them still aren't - but they are ultimately of a class of solvable problems, like neural correlates, the role of dopaminergic pathways, and so-on. These everyday neurological findings are needed to make progress toward understanding the brain, but they don't really have anything to do with consciousness.
Some definitions:
Intelligence and selfhood fall under the Easy Problems - both philosophically and neurologically. We have machines that for all intents and purposes are intelligent. Even though it's not perfect, we know what kind of problem that is and how to solve it mechanistically. While nobody has invented a true "self" yet, if we ever find out exactly what conscious experiences are, scaffolding those experiences with self/identity becomes an organizational task (an Easy Problem). Still a very hard one involving neural correlates, cortical pathways, etc. from which we may derive new algorithms and paradigms, but ultimately solvable.So that leaves the mystery of raw experiences ("the aroma of coffee") which do not seem solvable in any scientific sense. You could say that a digital camera that detects faces in its viewfinder is intelligent, but it doesn't "see" the face, we know that it only unconsciously "detects" the face. So a mystery arises when we examine the human eye, because we see basically the same hardware as the camera: Lens (lens), sensor (retina), wire (optic nerve), chip (visual cortex). Even after mapping the entire visual cortex to all visual features, it just doesn't get us any closer to understanding that raw experience of "sight" that happens when you look at something. It's not the same thing.
I applaud all progress toward understanding the brain, and sometimes wonder why the whole of humanity are not all focused on solving problems like death and aging (by way of solving consciousness), as it seems like pretty much the most important possible thing to all of us!
Favorites on the topic: Donald Hoffman, John Searle, David Chalmers, Dan Dennett, Colin McGinn, Susan Blackmore, Sam Harris.
https://bower.sh/what-is-consciousness
> a chaotic thalamo-cortical loop
The aroma of coffee is not explained by the words "chaotic thalamo-cortical loop" - those are words used to loosely describe which neurons activate when I experience the aroma of coffee, but they are not the aroma of coffee, and there's no proof that they are even causal to that experience. It's a logical fallacy because many correlations are not causes but effects, and some are entirely unrelated. Example:
The green stoplight correlates with cars driving, but they don't cause a car to drive. No amount of learning about stoplights will teach you about how a car moves. From far away you simply noticed that the green light is loosely correlated with the cars moving, but that's all you know. That's what is meant by the phrase correlation is not causation - "False Cause Fallacy".
LLMs have nothing to do with consciousness, that's artificial intelligence which as I defined above is not the same as having a sensation. Intelligence (and selfhood, and other psychiatry) are all happening within the conscious process, they shouldn't be conflated with it.
> There's no hard problem of consciousness
If there's no problem - meaning, it's well-understood to the point you can reproduce it - then why has nobody been successful at producing it in isolation? The answer is, we don't know what consciousness is to the point we can reproduce it.
To deny consciousness outright is to deny the first-person observation that you're having right now. Empirical science is based on observational evidence, and there is observational evidence of an experience from your perspective - the fact of your experiential existence owes a grokable explanation - even if it is caused by or correlated with neurons in brains.
Seems plausible that a detailed enough mapping of correlates one day uncovers a single thing/feature/location/architecure/pattern/whatever that is present only when qualia are, and absent in all other processes. That would at least point us in a concrete direction.
When you think deeply about the Hard Problem, it's really The Impossible Problem because there's no way to solve it within our subject:object and "self" paradigms. Yet the problem persists.
Take something like the memory of the first time I tied my shoes - maybe you can find the exact neuronal correlations to that experience I have when I think of that, but they won't be that memory, nor do they even give up the ingredients to engineer that in some alternate setting. The memory itself seems like a completely different phenomenon that the neurons (themselves, concepts in consciousness) can never explain on their own.
How about the real real outside world? We don't know it. No one knows the thing in itself. So far, to see the world you have to be embedded in it and see something from a specific POV.
Why there is at all consciousness, idk. Why not? Consciousness seems functional... because humans can't really do anything while unconscious. So it seems to me very much part of evolution.
In materialism everything we know is machines and mechanisms: From atoms to trees to buildings. It works for explaining most things, but maybe there are some things that aren't machine-like, leaving us with no way to understand it (at least not using those concepts).
Think of it like - you can program a computer to do all kinds of things, but it will never "feel pain" because that is a totally different class of phenomenon that we have no idea how to produce - no amount of code will ever make pain or joy happen to the computer - it's not a code problem. "Feeling of pain" etc. are the primitives of our experience, these little experiences add up to make up our lives and selves, but we have no idea what they are or how to produce them. We only know adjacent physical things that happen alongside it like neurons firing - which not only doesn't even begin to explain it directly but is itself a concept of the consciousness machine we're trying to explain.
For instance, either new physics is involved or it isn't. Finding solid evidence for or against it does not seem impossible, and it would definitely constitute meaningful progress, at the very least by ruling some theories out.
I can accept that I have inner experiences and can suffer, but what about animals/robots/outsiders?
Will I need to take GPT-10's feelings into account, or is it completely unconscious?