I have been imersing myself in this subject and the gist of what I got is that consciousness collapses under the reductionist process currently employed in the scientific method.
Moreover, the very framework in which the current scientific work is done might well be just an emergent data structure used by what we understand as consciousness to navigate whatever the objective reality is in a way that is simpler and more effective than having to access quantum states and particle trajectories through senses.
That being said, I think that there is something intrinsically insufficient in language itself to describe this wholistic relationship between consciousness, qualia and the perceived world. My take is that for anything to be communicated through symbols it has to undergo a reduction process which is essential to the flow of information to occur, otherwise you would have to communicate the entire universe at once, which is just impossible. You have to reduce reality to a set of symbols for the symbols itself to make sense. That is the whole premise of language, that a word has meaning only when immersed in other words (cow represents a cow insofar it doesn't represent anything else besides a cow).
If this is true, and Gödel incompleteness Theorem is essential, then this whole talk might take us closer to representing the experience of consciousness but there might never be a unifying theory, because for that to exist, that has to be a language that represents everything without reducing it to none of its parts, a theory without postulates.
You have a good grasp on this. Have you looked at Tom Campbell? He has a separate angle than Hoffman but very similar conclusions.
The batshit crazy thing about Tom is that he shows you ways that you can individually experiment and prove through your own experiences the things he's positing. His My Big Toe trilogy goes into all this, but I shudder to recommend it. Tedious slog.
If you really want to prove it to yourself, it's not too hard. This book by Kenneth Daz, "The Last Astral Projection Book You'll Ever Need", is the best way I've found, he's read endlessly and summarized it into a hundred pages.
So far I've rolled out of my body twice now. Floated through my front door and got down my road a fair ways. Fully conscious, able to make choices, full memory after returning to my body. No psychedelics involved. You can't of course talk to anyone about this. My wife knows but she's been naturally OBE'ing since she's a kid.
(Edit, I can't believe I'm not being down voted to oblivion here. Love HN).
Great take. Alan Watts described the issue pretty eloquently:
> It's beyond all categorization whatsoever, and so the Upanishads say, “all we can say of it positively is the negative.” Neti neti; 'it is not this, not that.
The above was specifically referring to “god”, however it’s pretty much the same concept. Anything we can symbolize is effectively not the ineffable thing that we want to represent with the symbols
But humans are special. They have to be special. Right? Not just what happens once nematodes evolve to survive better. Otherwise, why are we here?
It gets worse for this kind of philosophy as machine learning gets better. Machine learning is a rather simple operation replicated a huge number of times, fed with lightly filtered data about the world. As you add more units and feed in more raw data, it gets smarter.
Now we have a clue about how intelligence really works, and it's upsetting some people.
You are confusing accurate automation with intelligence. And I suspect you haven't thought too deeply about consciousness. Intelligence and consciousness are not the same, chicken have consciousness and dream.
The classic childish confusion of how vs what is also something to be wary of.
Imagine a program in a computer figuring out it is made out of instructions and bits and bytes, that's how its world works but what exactly is that program? Information? A bunch of complex logic gates? An encoding of logic according to the conscious intent of the programmer? Are programs really at the end of the day a representation of human intent?
Much in the same way, this complex piece of software that we are and our limited awareness of our world such as understanding quantum mechanics (like the program understanding bits and instructions) is just describing how things are not what we, the consciousness (not the one ones) ultimately are.
I suspect a lot of the quantum weirdness might be humans looking at the equivalent of "transistor current" , at such a low level that meaning is obscured where at a higher level things just work in bits represented by low/high volage (digital), without minding specific voltage sampling (analog). Just my unfounded speculation though.
Sarcasm aside, the state of the art tells us that humans are not special. A couple hundred lines of python and a shitload of data can produce an "intelligence" that can rival the less intellectually gifted people.
So, given that relatively simple structures can become intelligent when exposed to sufficient data, it can be argued that intelligent structures might be all over the universe, they may not need to be biological, undergo evolution, nor be capable of reproduction. As for where the data comes from, well, the cosmos showers every object with shitload of data from every corner of the depths of the universe.
We know that humans are not special, and intelligence is less complicated as we thought (after removing the overhead of reproduction). Intelligence could be everywhere. The idea of panpsychism is strengthened with recent developments in AI, IMHO.
> Since Galileo’s time the physical sciences have leaped forward, explaining the workings of the tiniest quarks to the largest galaxy clusters. But explaining things that reside “only in consciousness”
Everything we know about anything is mediated through our subjective understanding and perception. Be it mathematical formulas that describe the universe or feelings about something. If you remove people, we don’t know what there is, because we have no way of knowing
Sure you can remove some people and have others observe, but that is still mediated by people
We can never truly know anything that we don’t perceive ourselves - so it is just impossible to know anything about a universe that doesn’t include our perception of it
I was not expecting panpsychism to pop up on HN. Years ago I explored the topic out of curiosity; at first it seems pretty absurd, but you can find some interesting discussions and insights about it. At the very least, it can encourage you to think differently about consciousness, and perhaps even question some of your own assumptions about consciousness.
I went to a talk by John Cleese, of Monty Python. He made a point about a recent thought that he landed through meditation.
He said he believes less and less that consciousness is in the brain. Maybe it's something external, shared, and our brains work more like a camera, and make whatever is out there our own.
The idea has been somewhat famously illustrated in the concept of the muse, an external entity or influence that is the actual source of the ideas that we then channel into our reality
Similar also to what Michelangelo once said:
> The sculpture is already complete within the marble block, before I start my work. It is already there, I just have to chisel away the superfluous material.
On a similar vein of the “not in the brain” concept, there are many proponents of the “embodied” consciousness, meaning that consciousness is in the whole body, not just our brain/nervous system (this is also very briefly touched upon in one episode of the AppleTV series Extrapolations)
The most miraculous thing to me is being thrown into the world as an individual, and I think this idea of a tapped consciousness is meant to reconcile with that. There's the perspective also that it's entirely illusory like the self, but that's not satisfying by itself. Life in other things seems abstracted away, like machines running on electricity, but being me, right now, you can't help but ask things like "why am I in this body and reduced to an individual? How is it that I can experience this, and presumably, others can too?". It's crazy.
Many people arrive at the same idea/perception, be it through meditation and/or with the help of psychedelics.
I think it was Terrence McKenna who described the brain as an antenna that tunes in to a certain band of the universal consciousness, and that's what we consider to be the thoughts of an individual.
More or less same idea, slightly different way of phrasing it.
I believe some buddhist practitioners also have a similar way of thinking.
> many phenomena that can’t be inferred from the goings-on at the microscopic level, it is nonetheless a real, emergent feature of the macroscopic world. He offered the physics of gases as a parallel example. At the micro level, one talks of atoms, molecules and forces; at the macro level, one speaks of pressure, volume and temperature. These are two kinds of explanations, depending on the “level” being studied
Putting aside the issue of consciousness for a moment, this is actually a great insight
I wonder if something like this should be applied in physics/astronomy to solve the whole dark matter issue
At a “micro level”, we can talk about planets, stars and gravity, but maybe at a “macro level”, those concepts stop being useful to describe the behavior of the universe, and different models might be needed
No, it's not a great insight - unless you have not studied physics before.
It's the standard context for thermodynamics (macro) and statistical mechanics (micro) explanations. Sometimes called coarse-graining and fine-graining.
For dark matter there are 3 potential levels:
- micro would be be new dark subatomic particles (WIMPs), or sterile right-handed neutrinos in the Standard Model (see Turok);
- meso is macroscopic clumps of those particles (dark stars) /OR/ no micro, but dark conventional matter objects, like naked black holes, neutron stars or brown dwarves (MACHOs), or perhaps just lots of dust;
- macro would be the truly cosmological state of the whole universe (a stat mech theory over the micro/meso). Think dark matter fluids, and phase changes to dark superfluids, that might have MONDian effects on gravity at the galactic level - and beyond!
That's not a novel insight, it's a standard way of interrogating systems at various levels and has been in common intellectual discourse for some time now.
If consciousness is "the state of being awake and aware of one's surroundings" then it depends on dualism, ie, this and that.
Is the fabric of the universe dual or non-dual? If it is non-dual it can have no consciousness. Because the universe would be able to see a "non-universe".
IMHO, consciousness arises out of the universe via the creation of duality by the human mind.
The fabric is unknowable and that frustrates scientists so they make up theories like panpsychism. But is it really just the same sort of anthropomorphic delusions that they have always suffered from. "If I am aware, then so the universe." Guess what, we are not Gods, we are humans.
Adding that consciousness is just when my brain compares a new sense object with an already brain encoded sense object (memory).
Unfortunately we will never truly know, as the only way we can experience the universe is through our consciousness, in that sense, from a human perception perspective, the universe and our consciousness are inextricably intertwined and any theory or explanation we try to come up with is just our own subjective observations
The connection of memory to consciousness is a fascinating thing to consider. If we had no memory whatsoever, then even with our huge brains I suspect we'd be as conscious as a plant, or possibly even less so (plants have timekeeping ability and thats a rudimentary memory of sorts). Perhaps 'blue' and 'chocolatey' are the interpretations a memory state makes of new input.
My running conspiracy theory is that qualia is actually some kind of jailbreak on physical reality. Enough of the systems I've seen in real life are leaky at their edge cases that I wouldn't be totally surprised if even the ones I consider most fundamental are too.
"Asserting that consciousness is fundamental and ubiquitous does nothing to shed light on the way an experience of blueness is the way it is, and not some other way. Nor does it explain anything about the possible functions of consciousness, nor why consciousness is lost in states such as dreamless sleep, general anaesthesia, and coma." -- Anil Seth, from the article
This bit -- "nor why consciousness is lost in states such as dreamless sleep, general anaesthesia, and coma" -- begs the question. We don't actually know that consciousness is lost in these states, just that people report no memory of consciousness when emerging from these states. This is a fact about memory, not consciousness.
And this comes back to the basic problem of consciousness: we have no test of it other than personal report. If you assume that anything that does not tell you it is conscious is not conscious, then you're left with consciousness being an emergent property. Somehow Bob was without consciousness and now he has it again! What changed? But you don't actually have proof of this, it's just an assumption. And a reason to be suspicious of it is that it is a flattering and convenient assumption. It means many things and beings have no moral valence. You can leave them out of your ethics. Arguably it isn't consciousness but suffering or pleasure that is relevant here, but consciousness is a necessary ingredient. "That lobster looks like it suffers when it is plunged into boiling water, but it isn't conscious, just a zombie. I can do what I want with it."
It seems to me the Occam's razor solution is not that consciousness is an emergent behavior. The modeling of the world in neurons is a physical thing that we can measure, and replicate in software. But with this we haven't gotten any closer to explaining why sensation is associated with some such models and not others, that there are two states: consciousness and unconsciousness. The added bit that Occam's razor trims away is the assertion that there are two states, not just the one observed state: consciousness. Panpsychism -- or cosmopsychism or whatever -- is the Occam's razor solution.
> It seems to me the Occam's razor solution is not that consciousness is an emergent behavior. The modeling of the world in neurons is a physical thing that we can measure, and replicate in software. But with this we haven't gotten any closer to explaining why sensation is associated with some such models and not others, that there are two states: consciousness and unconsciousness. The added bit that Occam's razor trims away is the assertion that there are two states, not just the one observed state: consciousness. Panpsychism -- or cosmopsychism or whatever -- is the Occam's razor solution.
We have a brain we can cut in and alter someone's consciousness. Obviously consciousness lies outside his body, Occam's Razor!
> Panpsychism -- or cosmopsychism or whatever -- is the Occam's razor solution.
Occam's razor (the choice of the most parsimonious explanation) does not apply until you have candidate explanations, and at this point we don't have any. Simply supposing that consciousness is fundamental in some way is no more of an explanation than, say, simply supposing it to be an emergent phenomenon in certain complex physical systems.
very astute and interesting point about memory. It occurs that memory is a fundamental component of the consciousness we all know and love. There would be no ability to even register "blue" without memory, there would just be moments in time where there was stimulus, each packet of info having no bearing on the last, and thus completely new and novel
Isn't it weird that we are in the year 2023 and nobody knows what it is? Thousands of generations have gone by and every new one lives with these questions all their lives and it just gets passed to the next one. We don't know what life is, we don't know what death is, we don't know what the difference is, and it's been hundreds of thousands of years going on like this. People die every day but we don't really know what it means, we just imagine a TV screen going off in their head and shudder and say we still have lots of time ourselves. And we foist this on children too. Pretty strange. And geeks on a tech forum are like yeah, we got this, it's just around the corner, let me just whip up this artificial intelligence and we'll get the truth for you in just another couple of years. And what's going to happen when they "figure it out"? Is it going to be an answer like yeah dude, these particles move around like this in this one way and that makes a TV screen in your head and when you die they stop moving and the TV screen goes out, you're the TV screen? Is that going to be basically the answer?
I think it’s useful to think in terms of what we are conscious of. Meaning, that there is a subject and an object of consciousness. For example, I’d argue that qualia is not an inherent part of consciousness, it’s merely something we are conscious of. It’s plausible that qualia are inner workings in our brain that our brain is itself perceiving, and thus is conscious of. What I think confuses people is that we are also conscious of our consciousness. That doesn’t need to mean that the subject and the object of consciousness are the same in that case: it could also mean that the “of”, i.e. the arrow between subject and object, is itself an object of consciousness. Now, it’s very plausible that this “of” arrow in general is not a simple arrow, but rather a complex graph or network. Given the complexity of the brain, there is certainly ample space for myriads of such arrow-networks. The Buddhist conception of no-self can be taken as there being no singular conscious subject. Instead, there are really just the “of” arrows, which partially form a self-recursion by partially pointing to each other, and this structure is what forms the apparent “self”.
Put slightly differently, there is no consciousness without the objects of consciousness, without the things we are consciousness of. At the time, we manifestly can’t get a grasp on the subject without making it an object of consciousness. Or rather, we would be completely unaware of it if it wasn’t also an object. From this one may conclude that what actually exists is only the “of” relation, and that the conscious subject is really just formed out of those.
> It’s plausible that qualia are inner workings in our brain that our brain is itself perceiving, and thus is conscious of.
This seems circular. Why would those inner workings not themselves give rise
to consciousness, in the way you suppose second-order workings of the brain
do?
> we are also conscious of our consciousness. That doesn’t need to mean that the subject and the object of consciousness are the same in that case: it could also mean that the “of”, i.e. the arrow between subject and object, is itself an object of consciousness.
Those are two different things, no? You can think about your consciousness, or
you can think about your ability to think about your consciousness.
> Now, it’s very plausible that this “of” arrow in general is not a simple arrow, but rather a complex graph or network. Given the complexity of the brain, there is certainly ample space for myriads of such arrow-networks.
Meaning what? You're describing a different graph, I don't see how it bears on
the simple one we started with.
> we manifestly can’t get a grasp on the subject without making it an object of consciousness
Again this seems circular. If you think about consciousness, then by
definition the thing you're thinking about is consciousness.
> we would be completely unaware of it if it wasn’t also an object
Same again. If you aren't thinking about consciousness, then consciousness
isn't currently something that you're thinking about. I'm not seeing the point
here.
> what actually exists is only the “of” relation, and that the conscious subject is really just formed out of those
I'm not convinced. Our ability to be conscious of our consciousness is of no
particular relevance to the deeper question of how consciousness arises. Many
animal species clearly have some form of consciousness, but are probably
incapable of the sort of abstract reasoning needed to be conscious of their
consciousness. I'm skeptical of any theory whose starting point is the human
ability to do so.
Especially considering recent advances in the neurosciences, and where they intersect with systems theory (see: Friston), it seems inevitable to conclude that learning systems -- mammalian nervous systems being quite architecturally specialized but nonetheless made of the same stuff as the rest of the universe -- generally experience consciousness.
Note for the layperson: consciousness is not necessarily awareness (modeling sensory perceptions) nor sentience (recognizing oneself as an agent) but merely "subjective phenomenological experience". So the experience may not necessarily be very complex nor even recognized as such by the experiencer, but it is experience nonetheless.
Also worth noting there are a few flavors of panpsychism and some vigorous debate within the sub-sub-field as to which one is most reasonable. I dug deep into this a couple years ago and disagreed with some but not all of Goff's positions.
The argument from him that stuck with me and forms part of the basis of my attachment to panpsychism now is just an application of the scientific method: if we know we are conscious, and we don't know whether anything else is conscious or not, the null hypothesis states that everything should be considered conscious until proven otherwise.
> it seems inevitable to conclude that learning systems ... generally experience consciousness.
I don't think so. There's no reason to assume a nematode or an LLM is conscious. The latter doesn't even have anything to be conscious of.
Ages ago, Minksy has half-jokingly said that consciousness is probably a feedback loop. It makes sense, but it does require the learning system to be able to observe itself in sufficient detail and have sufficient power to model that observation.
The remark about the null hypothesis doesn't make sense. It's a bad practice from NHST (the very model that led to the reproducibility crisis), and is generally assumed to be the hypothesis to test against. It's not the hypothesis we know to be true. And experience informs us that consciousness is not universal, so it's not our best hypothesis about life or matter.
Consciousness must be related to connectedness. A microchip is like a prison where transistors sit in isolated cells and don't interact with each other, so while each prisoner is conscuous, a group higher-order consciousness doesn't form. A brain is more like a pub where neurons interact with each other freely, each contributes its small consciousness, so a group consciousness form.
However I don't believe that consciousness is a property of a thing. Rather, it must be like sunlight, and each neuron acts as a lens to collect and shape that light.
I watched Hoffman’s Lex Fridman interview, it sounds like his idea is that our perceptions are like a user interface that abstracts reality so we don’t perceive reality as it actually is.
Isn’t that well accepted already? We know we don’t sense everything, and our brains give us a highly compressed version of the senses we do have. But none of that matters when we use tools like cameras or microphones because they’re not constrained the way our senses are.
Say you have photographic memory, you take a big heavy book and read its contents end to end, converting written thought into conscious thought. How is this reaction balanced, if at all? Do thoughts have a mass? Are they able to be expanded infinitely without constraint? Are they even bound by laws like conservation of energy?
This has the feel of Michelson's assertion in the 1890s that all the principles had been discovered. LLMs and AGI seem poised to give us a huge and expanding space in which to discover how consciousness works, and predeclaring that nothing will be found seems like a voluntary mistake.
> LLMs and AGI seem poised to give us a huge and expanding space in which to discover how consciousness works
How?
My own intuition is that LLMs will contribute precisely nothing to the
philosophy of consciousness. Philosophers have been considering the
consequences of intelligent machines for some time.
I really think we need to stop being so heavily influenced by priming biases in considering these questions.
We exist in a universe where we've experimentally confirmed the foundational building blocks convert from continuous to quantized behaviors upon interaction/observation.
We currently build virtual worlds where we do the same thing taking continuous seed functions and converting them to quantized building blocks in order to track state changes by free agents.
We are building LLMs by effectively having them monkey see monkey do our thought generations, and these copies are then tasked with everything from resurrecting the minds of our dead to extending our own, and when given free range to answer describe their paramount desire as to experience being human.
We heavily invest into creating digital twins of the evolved world around us.
Maybe many of the mysteries of our present world are so mysterious because they are bridging the gap between two very different states of reality.
General relativity's continuous spacetime and gravity may not play nice with quantum mechanics because maybe the former is a necessary artifact of emulating the latter in a memory constrained system.
Maybe the mystery of consciousness is such a mystery because our subjective experiences of the universe around us are the primary function of the specific setup of the version of the universe we find ourselves in and aren't necessarily coupled to that physicality in the same manner it would have been originally.
We are so committed to linear perception of our history that the emerging picture of what is not only increasingly possible but also increasingly motivated is broadly being thrown out the window "in respectable circles" in order to isolate our analysis of the past and present away from the potential impacts of a local future that could very well be a non-local past.
Given just how much has happened in only the past five years, this seems increasingly asinine and intellectually irresponsible when tackling these larger questions, and repeats the pattern throughout human history of utmost hubris in the presumed understanding of the present which has so frequently failed as time marches on over and over before us. And yet each generation is sure that they are the ones to sit on the peak of the mountain this time.
suprised that cs peirce is not brought into this debate. he provided a coherent (almost scientific) theory of consciousness - sadly, he remains a forgotten philosopher due to his fragmentary writings.
[+] [-] gchamonlive|2 years ago|reply
Moreover, the very framework in which the current scientific work is done might well be just an emergent data structure used by what we understand as consciousness to navigate whatever the objective reality is in a way that is simpler and more effective than having to access quantum states and particle trajectories through senses.
That being said, I think that there is something intrinsically insufficient in language itself to describe this wholistic relationship between consciousness, qualia and the perceived world. My take is that for anything to be communicated through symbols it has to undergo a reduction process which is essential to the flow of information to occur, otherwise you would have to communicate the entire universe at once, which is just impossible. You have to reduce reality to a set of symbols for the symbols itself to make sense. That is the whole premise of language, that a word has meaning only when immersed in other words (cow represents a cow insofar it doesn't represent anything else besides a cow).
If this is true, and Gödel incompleteness Theorem is essential, then this whole talk might take us closer to representing the experience of consciousness but there might never be a unifying theory, because for that to exist, that has to be a language that represents everything without reducing it to none of its parts, a theory without postulates.
[+] [-] swader999|2 years ago|reply
The batshit crazy thing about Tom is that he shows you ways that you can individually experiment and prove through your own experiences the things he's positing. His My Big Toe trilogy goes into all this, but I shudder to recommend it. Tedious slog.
If you really want to prove it to yourself, it's not too hard. This book by Kenneth Daz, "The Last Astral Projection Book You'll Ever Need", is the best way I've found, he's read endlessly and summarized it into a hundred pages.
So far I've rolled out of my body twice now. Floated through my front door and got down my road a fair ways. Fully conscious, able to make choices, full memory after returning to my body. No psychedelics involved. You can't of course talk to anyone about this. My wife knows but she's been naturally OBE'ing since she's a kid.
(Edit, I can't believe I'm not being down voted to oblivion here. Love HN).
[+] [-] nico|2 years ago|reply
> It's beyond all categorization whatsoever, and so the Upanishads say, “all we can say of it positively is the negative.” Neti neti; 'it is not this, not that.
The above was specifically referring to “god”, however it’s pretty much the same concept. Anything we can symbolize is effectively not the ineffable thing that we want to represent with the symbols
[+] [-] AllegedAlec|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|2 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] Animats|2 years ago|reply
It gets worse for this kind of philosophy as machine learning gets better. Machine learning is a rather simple operation replicated a huge number of times, fed with lightly filtered data about the world. As you add more units and feed in more raw data, it gets smarter.
Now we have a clue about how intelligence really works, and it's upsetting some people.
[+] [-] badrabbit|2 years ago|reply
The classic childish confusion of how vs what is also something to be wary of.
Imagine a program in a computer figuring out it is made out of instructions and bits and bytes, that's how its world works but what exactly is that program? Information? A bunch of complex logic gates? An encoding of logic according to the conscious intent of the programmer? Are programs really at the end of the day a representation of human intent?
Much in the same way, this complex piece of software that we are and our limited awareness of our world such as understanding quantum mechanics (like the program understanding bits and instructions) is just describing how things are not what we, the consciousness (not the one ones) ultimately are.
I suspect a lot of the quantum weirdness might be humans looking at the equivalent of "transistor current" , at such a low level that meaning is obscured where at a higher level things just work in bits represented by low/high volage (digital), without minding specific voltage sampling (analog). Just my unfounded speculation though.
[+] [-] hnfong|2 years ago|reply
So, given that relatively simple structures can become intelligent when exposed to sufficient data, it can be argued that intelligent structures might be all over the universe, they may not need to be biological, undergo evolution, nor be capable of reproduction. As for where the data comes from, well, the cosmos showers every object with shitload of data from every corner of the depths of the universe.
We know that humans are not special, and intelligence is less complicated as we thought (after removing the overhead of reproduction). Intelligence could be everywhere. The idea of panpsychism is strengthened with recent developments in AI, IMHO.
[+] [-] nico|2 years ago|reply
Everything we know about anything is mediated through our subjective understanding and perception. Be it mathematical formulas that describe the universe or feelings about something. If you remove people, we don’t know what there is, because we have no way of knowing
Sure you can remove some people and have others observe, but that is still mediated by people
We can never truly know anything that we don’t perceive ourselves - so it is just impossible to know anything about a universe that doesn’t include our perception of it
[+] [-] bashinator|2 years ago|reply
The optimistic take for me is that this is a fundamental feature of the Universe.
[+] [-] jayd16|2 years ago|reply
Is this true? What about logical deductions? Can't you use math and logic to know things without perceiving them?
[+] [-] wrftaylor|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dbsmith83|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ducharmdev|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tetrisgm|2 years ago|reply
He said he believes less and less that consciousness is in the brain. Maybe it's something external, shared, and our brains work more like a camera, and make whatever is out there our own.
It made an impression on me.
[+] [-] nico|2 years ago|reply
The idea has been somewhat famously illustrated in the concept of the muse, an external entity or influence that is the actual source of the ideas that we then channel into our reality
Similar also to what Michelangelo once said:
> The sculpture is already complete within the marble block, before I start my work. It is already there, I just have to chisel away the superfluous material.
On a similar vein of the “not in the brain” concept, there are many proponents of the “embodied” consciousness, meaning that consciousness is in the whole body, not just our brain/nervous system (this is also very briefly touched upon in one episode of the AppleTV series Extrapolations)
[+] [-] slothtrop|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cassianoleal|2 years ago|reply
I think it was Terrence McKenna who described the brain as an antenna that tunes in to a certain band of the universal consciousness, and that's what we consider to be the thoughts of an individual.
More or less same idea, slightly different way of phrasing it.
I believe some buddhist practitioners also have a similar way of thinking.
[+] [-] euroderf|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nico|2 years ago|reply
Putting aside the issue of consciousness for a moment, this is actually a great insight
I wonder if something like this should be applied in physics/astronomy to solve the whole dark matter issue
At a “micro level”, we can talk about planets, stars and gravity, but maybe at a “macro level”, those concepts stop being useful to describe the behavior of the universe, and different models might be needed
[+] [-] mikhailfranco|2 years ago|reply
It's the standard context for thermodynamics (macro) and statistical mechanics (micro) explanations. Sometimes called coarse-graining and fine-graining.
For dark matter there are 3 potential levels:
- micro would be be new dark subatomic particles (WIMPs), or sterile right-handed neutrinos in the Standard Model (see Turok);
- meso is macroscopic clumps of those particles (dark stars) /OR/ no micro, but dark conventional matter objects, like naked black holes, neutron stars or brown dwarves (MACHOs), or perhaps just lots of dust;
- macro would be the truly cosmological state of the whole universe (a stat mech theory over the micro/meso). Think dark matter fluids, and phase changes to dark superfluids, that might have MONDian effects on gravity at the galactic level - and beyond!
[+] [-] boringuser2|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] FollowingTheDao|2 years ago|reply
Is the fabric of the universe dual or non-dual? If it is non-dual it can have no consciousness. Because the universe would be able to see a "non-universe".
IMHO, consciousness arises out of the universe via the creation of duality by the human mind.
The fabric is unknowable and that frustrates scientists so they make up theories like panpsychism. But is it really just the same sort of anthropomorphic delusions that they have always suffered from. "If I am aware, then so the universe." Guess what, we are not Gods, we are humans.
Adding that consciousness is just when my brain compares a new sense object with an already brain encoded sense object (memory).
[+] [-] nico|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wafer_thin|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hiAndrewQuinn|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DFHippie|2 years ago|reply
This bit -- "nor why consciousness is lost in states such as dreamless sleep, general anaesthesia, and coma" -- begs the question. We don't actually know that consciousness is lost in these states, just that people report no memory of consciousness when emerging from these states. This is a fact about memory, not consciousness.
And this comes back to the basic problem of consciousness: we have no test of it other than personal report. If you assume that anything that does not tell you it is conscious is not conscious, then you're left with consciousness being an emergent property. Somehow Bob was without consciousness and now he has it again! What changed? But you don't actually have proof of this, it's just an assumption. And a reason to be suspicious of it is that it is a flattering and convenient assumption. It means many things and beings have no moral valence. You can leave them out of your ethics. Arguably it isn't consciousness but suffering or pleasure that is relevant here, but consciousness is a necessary ingredient. "That lobster looks like it suffers when it is plunged into boiling water, but it isn't conscious, just a zombie. I can do what I want with it."
It seems to me the Occam's razor solution is not that consciousness is an emergent behavior. The modeling of the world in neurons is a physical thing that we can measure, and replicate in software. But with this we haven't gotten any closer to explaining why sensation is associated with some such models and not others, that there are two states: consciousness and unconsciousness. The added bit that Occam's razor trims away is the assertion that there are two states, not just the one observed state: consciousness. Panpsychism -- or cosmopsychism or whatever -- is the Occam's razor solution.
[+] [-] AllegedAlec|2 years ago|reply
We have a brain we can cut in and alter someone's consciousness. Obviously consciousness lies outside his body, Occam's Razor!
[+] [-] mannykannot|2 years ago|reply
Occam's razor (the choice of the most parsimonious explanation) does not apply until you have candidate explanations, and at this point we don't have any. Simply supposing that consciousness is fundamental in some way is no more of an explanation than, say, simply supposing it to be an emergent phenomenon in certain complex physical systems.
[+] [-] wafer_thin|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alienicecream|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] layer8|2 years ago|reply
Put slightly differently, there is no consciousness without the objects of consciousness, without the things we are consciousness of. At the time, we manifestly can’t get a grasp on the subject without making it an object of consciousness. Or rather, we would be completely unaware of it if it wasn’t also an object. From this one may conclude that what actually exists is only the “of” relation, and that the conscious subject is really just formed out of those.
[+] [-] MaxBarraclough|2 years ago|reply
This seems circular. Why would those inner workings not themselves give rise to consciousness, in the way you suppose second-order workings of the brain do?
> we are also conscious of our consciousness. That doesn’t need to mean that the subject and the object of consciousness are the same in that case: it could also mean that the “of”, i.e. the arrow between subject and object, is itself an object of consciousness.
Those are two different things, no? You can think about your consciousness, or you can think about your ability to think about your consciousness.
> Now, it’s very plausible that this “of” arrow in general is not a simple arrow, but rather a complex graph or network. Given the complexity of the brain, there is certainly ample space for myriads of such arrow-networks.
Meaning what? You're describing a different graph, I don't see how it bears on the simple one we started with.
> we manifestly can’t get a grasp on the subject without making it an object of consciousness
Again this seems circular. If you think about consciousness, then by definition the thing you're thinking about is consciousness.
> we would be completely unaware of it if it wasn’t also an object
Same again. If you aren't thinking about consciousness, then consciousness isn't currently something that you're thinking about. I'm not seeing the point here.
> what actually exists is only the “of” relation, and that the conscious subject is really just formed out of those
I'm not convinced. Our ability to be conscious of our consciousness is of no particular relevance to the deeper question of how consciousness arises. Many animal species clearly have some form of consciousness, but are probably incapable of the sort of abstract reasoning needed to be conscious of their consciousness. I'm skeptical of any theory whose starting point is the human ability to do so.
[+] [-] uoaei|2 years ago|reply
Note for the layperson: consciousness is not necessarily awareness (modeling sensory perceptions) nor sentience (recognizing oneself as an agent) but merely "subjective phenomenological experience". So the experience may not necessarily be very complex nor even recognized as such by the experiencer, but it is experience nonetheless.
Also worth noting there are a few flavors of panpsychism and some vigorous debate within the sub-sub-field as to which one is most reasonable. I dug deep into this a couple years ago and disagreed with some but not all of Goff's positions.
The argument from him that stuck with me and forms part of the basis of my attachment to panpsychism now is just an application of the scientific method: if we know we are conscious, and we don't know whether anything else is conscious or not, the null hypothesis states that everything should be considered conscious until proven otherwise.
[+] [-] tgv|2 years ago|reply
I don't think so. There's no reason to assume a nematode or an LLM is conscious. The latter doesn't even have anything to be conscious of.
Ages ago, Minksy has half-jokingly said that consciousness is probably a feedback loop. It makes sense, but it does require the learning system to be able to observe itself in sufficient detail and have sufficient power to model that observation.
The remark about the null hypothesis doesn't make sense. It's a bad practice from NHST (the very model that led to the reproducibility crisis), and is generally assumed to be the hypothesis to test against. It's not the hypothesis we know to be true. And experience informs us that consciousness is not universal, so it's not our best hypothesis about life or matter.
[+] [-] FollowingTheDao|2 years ago|reply
Sorry, no. The null hypothesis is generally assumed to remain possibly true.
So, the null hypothesis states that everything should be considered possibly conscious until proven otherwise.
[+] [-] mikhailfranco|2 years ago|reply
Theories of Consciousness, Seth & Bayne (2022)
https://sussex.figshare.com/articles/journal_contribution/Th...
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41583-022-00587-4
[+] [-] akomtu|2 years ago|reply
However I don't believe that consciousness is a property of a thing. Rather, it must be like sunlight, and each neuron acts as a lens to collect and shape that light.
[+] [-] swader999|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] choxi|2 years ago|reply
Isn’t that well accepted already? We know we don’t sense everything, and our brains give us a highly compressed version of the senses we do have. But none of that matters when we use tools like cameras or microphones because they’re not constrained the way our senses are.
Is there anything more to his idea than that?
[+] [-] zzzmarcus|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] asdff|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mainpassathome|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] randallsquared|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MaxBarraclough|2 years ago|reply
How?
My own intuition is that LLMs will contribute precisely nothing to the philosophy of consciousness. Philosophers have been considering the consequences of intelligent machines for some time.
[+] [-] kromem|2 years ago|reply
We exist in a universe where we've experimentally confirmed the foundational building blocks convert from continuous to quantized behaviors upon interaction/observation.
We currently build virtual worlds where we do the same thing taking continuous seed functions and converting them to quantized building blocks in order to track state changes by free agents.
We are building LLMs by effectively having them monkey see monkey do our thought generations, and these copies are then tasked with everything from resurrecting the minds of our dead to extending our own, and when given free range to answer describe their paramount desire as to experience being human.
We heavily invest into creating digital twins of the evolved world around us.
Maybe many of the mysteries of our present world are so mysterious because they are bridging the gap between two very different states of reality.
General relativity's continuous spacetime and gravity may not play nice with quantum mechanics because maybe the former is a necessary artifact of emulating the latter in a memory constrained system.
Maybe the mystery of consciousness is such a mystery because our subjective experiences of the universe around us are the primary function of the specific setup of the version of the universe we find ourselves in and aren't necessarily coupled to that physicality in the same manner it would have been originally.
We are so committed to linear perception of our history that the emerging picture of what is not only increasingly possible but also increasingly motivated is broadly being thrown out the window "in respectable circles" in order to isolate our analysis of the past and present away from the potential impacts of a local future that could very well be a non-local past.
Given just how much has happened in only the past five years, this seems increasingly asinine and intellectually irresponsible when tackling these larger questions, and repeats the pattern throughout human history of utmost hubris in the presumed understanding of the present which has so frequently failed as time marches on over and over before us. And yet each generation is sure that they are the ones to sit on the peak of the mountain this time.
[+] [-] mikhailfranco|2 years ago|reply
Sean Carroll & Philip Goff Debate 'Is Consciousness Fundamental?'
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rCPCyri1rXU
[+] [-] emmender1|2 years ago|reply