Overall, I'd say we are no closer to understanding consciousness than we were 30 years ago. As a science, we are still poking at the brain to gather data and proposing hand-wavy models of low level behavior. As philosophy, we still don't agree on what the phenomenon we need to study is.
My gut feeling is that consciousness/intelligence is an emergent phenomenon of the physical brain (a very high-dimensional non-linear system not amenable to reductionism) and that the simplest model of the brain will be
too complex for our brains to understand.
To be fair, the simplest model of a complete modern automobile is already too complex for a human to understand. (Except for the 10 geniuses perhaps.) Not a model of just the engine, or just the chemistry processes in the exhaust system, or just the electrical wiring, or how the painting jobs work - but the whole model of every subsystem existent in this car.
Notably, this does not stop us from making new cars.
There would need to be some substantial basis for a claim that a human brain will not soon be a similar deal: no one will undertand the whole system completely, but we will have experts on different areas and aspects of consciousness which will be more than enough for progress and specifically, strong AI.
Take a look at the Attention Schema Theory (AST) of consciousness by Michael Graziano. It is a mechanistic account of consciousness that avoids the rabbit holes of ‘hard problems’ and qualia.
The fundamental insight it makes is that there is a distinction between attention and awareness: that attention corresponds to neural firing patterns, and that awareness is a schema (model) of that attention. Awareness then feeds back into attention — moving it or sharpening it.
Think of it as a high-level programming SDK for the brain.
AST also helps explain why awareness evolved: it is a prediction engine for brains, both our own and others. And once competition began, an arms race of prediction begins that ultimately ends with a non-determinative ‘free-will’ that defies prediction.
If AST is correct, then consciousness is a simulation. It also means we have a roadmap to machine consciousness. Graziano has written articles that ask for engineers to try this model, but from what I can tell, no one has really tried (by intention). However, model-based reinforcement learning is pretty close. Especially the ones that are beginning to use action-prediction.
It won’t be long before we have paranoid androids.
> the simplest model of the brain will be too complex for our brains to understand
Why? We already have models of the brain and cognition, and they're improving over time. Just because we can't gain a sufficient understanding within a time scale suitable for you doesn't allow you to call it "too complex for our brains".
We'd have a much better understanding if we conducted live vivisection of prisoners, but we're not cruel. We have to glean what we can from shadows of knowledge. One day maybe our children will see the shape of reality. Even the things we think we understand now will be greatly expounded upon.
Sometimes I feel that consciousness is a bogus concept and will be abandoned: there will never be any major progress in "understanding" it, though future philosophers will probably discuss what 21st-century philosophers meant by "consciousness" in a similar way to how today's philosophers discuss what Hegel meant by "Aufhebung".
I'd be very happy to listen to arguments against that pessimistic viewpoint because then the hundreds of hours I've spent reading and thinking about the topic won't have been wasted.
The last book I read on the subject was Hofstadter's "I am a strange loop". I found myself agreeing with almost everything he wrote, so the book wasn't very exciting for me, though I should look up some of the bits of music he mentioned.
The author (Peter Hankins) does an excellent job of summarizing and critiquing current research papers in philosophy and neuroscience, and the comments on the articles are often very informative.
Can we the mystery of human consciousness in the 21st century? Ok, ok, maybe we should start with a definitions...
I'm starting to think that there's not much mystery left to consciousness, it's just that most people are really uncomfortable with the idea that "we" are just the complex interactions of electrical impulses and meat.
I'm hopeful the doctrine of panpsychism ends up being true.
I prefer the idea of my laptop equally having a consciousness as me and in some ways it's calming than the contrary possibility. If reality is just one deterministic system, it's reassuring to think of the system being designed for having universal observation and while still predetermined nothing is left out of its role in the stories unraveled.
I think panpsychism is a bad approach. If we look at consciousness as we encounter it in nature, it seems to be a property of self replicators in their competition for life and reproduction. So it can't be a property of laptops, unless they are self replicating laptops responsible for their own existence. Or could be a property of a virtual entity running in a sim in the laptop, but then it's not consciousness of the same world as ours.
The role of consciousness is to keep the body alive: fend dangers, find food and reproduce. It does that by taking into account the state of the environment and the internal state of the body and acting in such a way as to maximise its own rewards, learning to avoid bad situations along the way. Evolution has shaped the body and rewards in order to maximise survivability. It's interesting to see how surviving bootstraps meaning and consciousness out of itself (and its environment).
Even the most mainstream science already has big issues with the idea of "determinism". Many people still assume that determinism is the main paradigm, but actually it has not been for a while, with the introudction of the chaos theory.
Chaos theory is a very challenging and interesting concept which you should check out, but one of the most mundane outcomes of it is that there is no way to predict the physical world. No way to see what is going to happen. Now, obviously one could predict a simple neutonian mechanical system for a 10 second-period, or predict enough of electrical impulses in a piece of designed silicon to make a functional processor - but in general, in the widest sense, there is no way to predict the universe. Even with the assumption that there is some completely determined process at the microscopic core of every interaction - those processes, when combined into big systems, wired up with feedback loops and put in a system so tiny that one has to had a machine 2 times bigger than the original system in the first place: and we arrive at total unpredictability of the universe.
Note, this is not just practical unpredictability: the question is not about us not having enough technical prowess to predict the universe. The issue is that it is physically impossible to build any real prediction machine that would predic the whole thing: you would need a bigger universe than the universe it is trying to predict. It is even a logical contradiction!
Thus determinism becomes more of a philosophical outlook than an actual physical property that could be calculated, predicted etc.
Even the word itself - "determinism". Assumnig that the fate, the outcome of something is determined. In what way can it be determined if we know that it is physically impossible to determine it? Not because we lack machines or havent built a strong enough microscope. Our very own scientific paradigm, the scientific method, the way of thinking about the universe - the thing that lies at the core of our worldview - says that it is impossible to predict the whole system. Absolutely impossible. So it is unpredictable - ergo undetermined.
[+] [-] AareyBaba|7 years ago|reply
Overall, I'd say we are no closer to understanding consciousness than we were 30 years ago. As a science, we are still poking at the brain to gather data and proposing hand-wavy models of low level behavior. As philosophy, we still don't agree on what the phenomenon we need to study is.
My gut feeling is that consciousness/intelligence is an emergent phenomenon of the physical brain (a very high-dimensional non-linear system not amenable to reductionism) and that the simplest model of the brain will be too complex for our brains to understand.
[+] [-] Erlich_Bachman|7 years ago|reply
Notably, this does not stop us from making new cars.
There would need to be some substantial basis for a claim that a human brain will not soon be a similar deal: no one will undertand the whole system completely, but we will have experts on different areas and aspects of consciousness which will be more than enough for progress and specifically, strong AI.
[+] [-] wildermuthn|7 years ago|reply
The fundamental insight it makes is that there is a distinction between attention and awareness: that attention corresponds to neural firing patterns, and that awareness is a schema (model) of that attention. Awareness then feeds back into attention — moving it or sharpening it.
Think of it as a high-level programming SDK for the brain.
AST also helps explain why awareness evolved: it is a prediction engine for brains, both our own and others. And once competition began, an arms race of prediction begins that ultimately ends with a non-determinative ‘free-will’ that defies prediction.
If AST is correct, then consciousness is a simulation. It also means we have a roadmap to machine consciousness. Graziano has written articles that ask for engineers to try this model, but from what I can tell, no one has really tried (by intention). However, model-based reinforcement learning is pretty close. Especially the ones that are beginning to use action-prediction.
It won’t be long before we have paranoid androids.
[+] [-] gonehome|7 years ago|reply
The poorly defined word of consciousness may mean we’re asking the wrong question, but I find it pretty unlikely it’s too complex to understand.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/8QzZKw9WHRxjR4948/the-futili...
[+] [-] echelon|7 years ago|reply
Why? We already have models of the brain and cognition, and they're improving over time. Just because we can't gain a sufficient understanding within a time scale suitable for you doesn't allow you to call it "too complex for our brains".
We'd have a much better understanding if we conducted live vivisection of prisoners, but we're not cruel. We have to glean what we can from shadows of knowledge. One day maybe our children will see the shape of reality. Even the things we think we understand now will be greatly expounded upon.
[+] [-] c1sc0|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bloak|7 years ago|reply
I'd be very happy to listen to arguments against that pessimistic viewpoint because then the hundreds of hours I've spent reading and thinking about the topic won't have been wasted.
The last book I read on the subject was Hofstadter's "I am a strange loop". I found myself agreeing with almost everything he wrote, so the book wasn't very exciting for me, though I should look up some of the bits of music he mentioned.
[+] [-] ivansavz|7 years ago|reply
The author (Peter Hankins) does an excellent job of summarizing and critiquing current research papers in philosophy and neuroscience, and the comments on the articles are often very informative.
Can we the mystery of human consciousness in the 21st century? Ok, ok, maybe we should start with a definitions...
[+] [-] trevyn|7 years ago|reply
Or, perhaps, the implications of that.
[+] [-] intralizee|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] visarga|7 years ago|reply
The role of consciousness is to keep the body alive: fend dangers, find food and reproduce. It does that by taking into account the state of the environment and the internal state of the body and acting in such a way as to maximise its own rewards, learning to avoid bad situations along the way. Evolution has shaped the body and rewards in order to maximise survivability. It's interesting to see how surviving bootstraps meaning and consciousness out of itself (and its environment).
[+] [-] Erlich_Bachman|7 years ago|reply
Chaos theory is a very challenging and interesting concept which you should check out, but one of the most mundane outcomes of it is that there is no way to predict the physical world. No way to see what is going to happen. Now, obviously one could predict a simple neutonian mechanical system for a 10 second-period, or predict enough of electrical impulses in a piece of designed silicon to make a functional processor - but in general, in the widest sense, there is no way to predict the universe. Even with the assumption that there is some completely determined process at the microscopic core of every interaction - those processes, when combined into big systems, wired up with feedback loops and put in a system so tiny that one has to had a machine 2 times bigger than the original system in the first place: and we arrive at total unpredictability of the universe.
Note, this is not just practical unpredictability: the question is not about us not having enough technical prowess to predict the universe. The issue is that it is physically impossible to build any real prediction machine that would predic the whole thing: you would need a bigger universe than the universe it is trying to predict. It is even a logical contradiction!
Thus determinism becomes more of a philosophical outlook than an actual physical property that could be calculated, predicted etc.
Even the word itself - "determinism". Assumnig that the fate, the outcome of something is determined. In what way can it be determined if we know that it is physically impossible to determine it? Not because we lack machines or havent built a strong enough microscope. Our very own scientific paradigm, the scientific method, the way of thinking about the universe - the thing that lies at the core of our worldview - says that it is impossible to predict the whole system. Absolutely impossible. So it is unpredictable - ergo undetermined.
[+] [-] hestefisk|7 years ago|reply