[twak]

fantastic book. Made me consider the question of whether consciousness exists at all or if it is just some hack by evolution to allow introspection.

I haven't found a definition of consciousness which is quantifiable or stands up to serious rigour. If it can't be measured and isn't necessary for intelligence, perhaps there is no magic cut-off between the likes of Dall-E and human intelligence. Perhaps the Chinese-room is as conscious as a human (and a brick)?

[patcon]

Also read the book due to comments here. Was very aligned with some of my interests in relationships between language, information, life/intelligence and metaphor <3

You might get a kick out of this paper (though some may find it's proposal a bit bleak, I think there's a way to integrate it without losing any of the sense of wonder of the experience of being alive :) )

It analogizes conscious experience to the a rainbow "which accompanies physical processes in the atmosphere but exerts no influence over them".

Chasing the Rainbow: The Non-conscious Nature of Being (2017) https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.0192...

> Though it is an end-product created by non-conscious executive systems, the personal narrative serves the powerful evolutionary function of enabling individuals to communicate (externally broadcast) the contents of internal broadcasting. This in turn allows recipients to generate potentially adaptive strategies, such as predicting the behavior of others and underlies the development of social and cultural structures, that promote species survival. Consequently, it is the capacity to communicate to others the contents of the personal narrative that confers an evolutionary advantage—not the experience of consciousness (personal awareness) itself.

So consciousness is more about what it subjectively feels like to be under pressure/influence to broadcast valuable internal signals to other (external) agents in our processes of life; aka other humans in the super-organism of humanity. I analogize it to what a cell "experiences" that compel it to release hormonal signals in a multicellular organism.

[f38zf5vdt]

> Made me consider the question of whether consciousness exists at all or if it is just some hack by evolution to allow introspection.

Can't it be both? What's the difference? Evolution just responds to the environment, so a method of complex interaction with the environment like "consciousness" or "ever-polling situational awareness" seems like par for the course.

[croes]

Evolution is the result of the environment not a response.

Giraffes didn't get a long neck because the food was out of reach, giraffes have a lock neck because the one without just died.

[otikik]

It is a hack alright. A very beautiful hack, refined in hundreds of thousands of iterations, with a very high price.

> to allow introspection

Evolution doesn’t do things “to anything”. It repeats what works, and kills the rest. Our brains have allowed us to adapt to the changes in the environment better than the rest. Conscience came with the pack. It might not have an actual “purpose”- it could be an “appendix”.

My personal belief is that consciousness started as the self-preservation instinct that most animals have, and we developed introspection as a way to strengthen our ties to other members of our family or tribe. And then we “won” (for now)

[somenameforme]

I think in these sort of topics we are often discussing two different meanings of consciousness: physical vs philosophical. The arbitrary mixing and matching of them is likely one the reasons for the lack of clarity. Physical consciousness is most easily identified by the notion that you're unconscious when sleeping. The other is the far more interesting philosophical consciousness.

Philosophical consciousness is what the oft misunderstood quote cogito ergo sum, I think therefore I am, was hitting on. Descartes was not saying that consciousness is defined by thinking. He was trying to identify what he could know was really real in this world. When one goes to sleep, the dreams we have can often be indistinguishable from a reality in themselves, until we awake and find it was all just a dream. So what makes one think this reality isn't simply one quite long and vivid dream from which we may one day awake?

But this wasn't an appeal to nihilism, the exact opposite. The one thing he could be certain of is that he, or some entity within him, was observing everything. And so, at the minimum, this entity must exist. And the presence of this entity is what I think many of us are discussing when we speak of consciousness. In contrast to physical consciousness, you are philosophically conscious even when sleeping.

Of course like you said philosophical consciousness cannot be proven or measured and likely never will be able to be, which makes it an entirely philosophical topic. It is impossible for me to prove I am conscious to you, or vice versa, no matter what either of us does. Quite the private affair, though infinitely interesting to ponder.

[akomtu]

There is a lot of literature on this topic, but nearly all of it is in the "restricted" section of the library: it's the section with book shelves for alchemy, occultism, buddhism and so on. Western literature is very shallow in this regard.

There a few interesting thoughts about consciousness that I've found in those books. One is that the boundary between consciousness and "real matter" is imaginary: consciousness exists only because of change in that matter, when the change stops - so does consciousness, consciousness creates reality for itself, and the two are in fact just two sides of the coin. In other words, static consciousness isnt a thing, and hence the need for "reality".

Human consciousness is a sum of many consciousnesses that exist at wildly different levels of reality. There are primitive cellular consciousnesses, and those sometimes influence our mental consciousness. Our neural cerebrospinal system has an advanced consciousness capable of independent existence: it manages all the activity of internal organs, and only loosly interacts with our higher mental consciousness. That cerebrospinal system is even self-conscious in a primitive way: it can observe its own internal changes and distinguish them from impulses from the outside. There's emotional and mental consciousness that mainly lives in the brain and is somewhat aware of the dark sea of lower consciousness below it.

Most people are conscious in dreams, as they can perceive in that state. However they cant make (yet) distinction between inner processes (self) and external effects (others), so to them it appears as if everything is happening inside their mind, i.e. they are not self-conscious. That's consciousness of a toddler. Some are more advanced, they start seeing the me-others difference and can form memories from dreams.