I've never understood why Chalmer's reasoning is so captivating to people. The whole idea of p-zombies seems absurd on its face. Quoting the article:
(quote)
His core argument against materialism, in its original form, is deceptively (and delightfully) simple:
1. In our world, there are conscious experiences.
2. There is a logically possible world physically identical to ours, in which the positive facts about consciousness in our world do not hold.
3. Therefore, facts about consciousness are further facts about our world, over and above the physical facts.
4. So, materialism is false.
(endquote)
Point 2 is textbook begging the question: it imagines a world which is physically identical to ours but consciousness is different there. That is baking in the presupposition that consciousness is not a physical process. Points 3 and 4 then "cleverly" detect the very contradiction he has planted and claims victory.
If you believe that what we describe as "consciousness" is emergent from the ideas a material brain develops about itself, then it's in fact not logically possible to have a world that is physically identical to ours yet does not contain consciousness. So indeed, premise 2. sneaks in the conclusion.
To illustrate this point, here's an argument with the same structure that would similarly "prove" that gravity doesn't cause things to fall down:
1. In our world, there is gravity and things fall down.
2. There is a logically possible world where there is gravity yet things do not fall down.
3. Therefore, things falling down is a further fact about our world, over and above gravity.
4. So, gravity causing things to fall down is false.
The thing is we are acting like 99.9% p-zombies for most of our interactions with the world - that is we are acting unconsciosly for most of what we do.
The question is where does that subjective 0.01% - the rider on top of the elephant come from?
We generally do not pay attention to walking, breathing or brushing teeth and so on.
We can do more complex tasks as well once we achieve unconscious mastery in some subject.
With proper training we can play chess or tennis ("The Inner Game of Tennis") at a high level, without paying attention. In fact it can be detrimental to think about one's performance.
It is the Dennett's "multiple drafts model" - but where does the subjective experience arise when some model is brought to foreground "thread"?
Thus allure of Chalmer's zombies. Why not have a 100% zombie?
There are many stories of people seemingly being conscious, yet not really.
Black out drunks driving home from a bar.
Hypoglycemic shock is another example - my wife's diabetic friend was responding seemingly logically and claiming to be conscious, yet she was not and paramedics were barely able to save her.
A human being can achieve very high levels on unconscious mastery in multiple subjects.
A very tired me gave a remote lecture (on intermediate Python) during Covid where I switched spoken languages mid-lecture and even answered questions in a different language. Meanwhile I was was half asleep and thinking about a different subject matter. I was not really aware of the lecture material - I had given the same lecture many times before - I was on autopilot.
Only after watching the Zoom recording I realized what had happened.
Thus, are there are some actions that our zombie (unconscious) states unable to produce?
Presumably, subjective experience helps in planning future actions. That could be one avenue to explore.
A simple counter-argument to p-zombies that I like (I first encountered from Yudkowski) is:
If there was no conscious experience in this identical p-zombie world, it would be impossible to explain why everybody falsely claims they have conscious experience. If people stop claiming this, then the world is physically different, as people no longer act and produce artifacts such as HN posts discussing the phenomenon.
Or, my summary would be: conscious experience is causal, and so you cannot get the same universe-wide effects without it.
> Point 2 is textbook begging the question: it imagines a world which is physically identical to ours but consciousness is different there.
It's not begging the question. He gives reasons for (2) that support the premise. That the premise essentially leads inexorably to (4) is a feature of the argument structure, not a bug. You have to engage with his reasons for (2) in determining whether or not the argument succeeds.
P-zombies is a thought experiment to demonstrate the hard problem of consciousness, it is not, in itself, an argument against materialism.
I can certainly imagine a robot that imitates all of human behaviors. If you hit it, it goes "Ow" and retracts, if you ask it if its conscious it says "yes". We can this imagine being created out of our completely physical electrical components, so the question becomes what is the difference between the imitation of consciousness and the consciousness we experience? This is interesting as in this day and age, we can totally imagine building such a robot, yet we'd have a tough time believing it is actually conscious.
Now, whether you are a materialist or not depends entirely on whether or not you believe conscious experience like yours can emerge out of physical components.
My take on this is: Materialism/physicalism is ill defined and materialism/physicalism and dualism are compatible. We consider completely mysterious properties like energy and now even randomness (things happen one way or another for no reason) as being fundamental physical facts about the universe. Theoretically, how does this differ from saying consciousness is a fundamental physical property?
Moreover, you have to consider the fact that the "material" world IS an imagination of the mind. Whatever facts or attributes we assign to being material is limited to the mental facilities of the brain.
At the end of the day, the question is, what fundamental facts do we need to explain the observations that we make? I can observe that I feel, see, hear things. Can the fundamental facts of the current physics model explain this? No? Then we must add to it an additional property, making it part of the standard physics model. If you want proof, you must either A. explain how consciousness can emerge out of existing known "material" processes, B. Admit consciousness as a "material" property and define the process by which it combines, reduces, etc. (the combination problem of panpsychism)
Chalmers' argument is more of an intuition pump to clarify your thinking. If premise 2 seems plausible, then you probably cannot be a physicalist. If you're a die-hard physicalist, then you probably have to deny premise 1 and/or 2.
Why is phenomenological subjective experience a thing at all? Unless you're a proponent of panpsychism, we have to ask why living beings have it, but other natural processes do not. From this perspective, it's actually easier to conceive of a world like ours without subjective experience than one with it.
No, you have to take that argument in context of his other arguments against physical explanations for consciousness. What he's saying is that the physical facts do not adequately account for conscious experiences, which is why we can conceive of a universe physically identical lacking consciousness. Why he (and some other philosophers) think this is so is part of their larger arguments.
If p-zombies are logically incoherent, the consciousness does not exist. It's an illusion. This is the argument by Daniel Dennet. We are zombies.
I mean it's obvious to any physicalist that we don't really feel anything. There is no I, soul, no suffering in a in a rock, peas soup, or a human. It's all physical process.
Chalmers in point 2 is not saying to imagine such a world, but that such a world is logically possible. Chalmers gives as an example of a logical impossibility a male vixen since it is contradictory. He states "... a flying telephone is conceptually coherent, if a little out of the ordinary, so a flying telephone is logically possible. Nevertheless, that zombies are logically possible, may be begging the question, that consciousness is non physical.
"The implications of consciousness explanations or theories are assessed with respect to four questions: meaning/purpose/value (if any); AI consciousness; virtual immortality; and survival beyond death."
This is theology. What's it doing in Elsevier's "Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology"?
Most of the classical arguments in this area are now obsolete. The classic big question, presented in the article, was, “Out of meat, how do you get thought?". That's no longer so mysterious. You get some basic processing elements from molecular biology. The puzzle, for a long time, was, can a large number of basic processing elements with no overall design self-organize into intelligence. Then came LLMs, which do exactly that.
As a thought experiment, imagine we were to scan the position of every molecule in the human body to the Heisenberg limit of accuracy. Imagine we were to plug the resulting model in a physics simulation that models every biochemical and physical interaction with perfect fidelity. This is a thought experiment, and what I suggest isn't ruled out by physics, so let's assume it's technologically possible. Would the simulated being be "conscious" in the same way the original human is? Would it experience "qualia"?
If you think the answer might be no, then congratulations, you actually believe in immaterial souls, no matter how materialist or rationalist you otherwise claim to be.
Only holds if whatever hardware that’s pretending to be the matter can act exactly like the matter without being the same thing.
For the distinction, consider the difference between a simulation of a simple chemical process in a computer—even a perfectly accurate one!—and the actual thing happening. Is the thing going on in the computer the same? No, no matter how perfect the simulation. It’s a little electricity moving around, looking nothing whatsoever like the real thing. The simulation is meaning that we impose on that electricity moving around.
That being the case, this reduces to “if we recreate the matter and state exactly, for-real, is that consciousness?” in which case yeah, sure, probably so.
This doesn’t work if the thing running the simulation requires interpretation.
Scott Aaronson’s take on this is certainly worth a read for anyone interested in consciousness , quantum mechanics, comparability theory, etc: https://arxiv.org/abs/1306.0159
Instead of one person, simulate the earth starting several million years before the dawn of man. If you think the humans that evolve in some simulation runs are not conscious, you believe in souls. If in the fake world you predict that in some large fraction of simulations of the unfeeling simulacra will nonetheless invent and argue about the concept of qualia, you believe in immaterial souls. If you suspect that because they don’t have souls they won’t write books about qualia you believe in material souls, souls that both affect and are affected by protons and electrons, souls that physics will eventually find.
Not necessarily, this assumes that it is possible to perfectly simulate physics on computers. It is not obvious that this is true. For one it assumes that physical interactions happen in discrete time steps (or at least be equivalent with a process that happens in discrete time steps). It also assumes that it is possible to perfectly scan the all the properties of some piece of matter (which we know is not possible)
The “total scan” argument, when presented to further a physicalist stance (“surely if we were to scan you using some fantasy tech X we would get an exact copy of you, including any consciousness if it exists, and to deny that is to believe in ghosts”), is unconvincing on at least two counts: 1) fantasy tech illustrating axiomatic belief in particular physical models that are in vogue today but will not hold in the long run (Heisenberg limit? who is she?); and 2) believing that the only alternative to monistic materialism is body-soul dualism, which is depressingly common among STEM folk philosophical naïveté.
The most obvious objection is that perceived time-space is a map of some fundamentally inaccessible to us territory, that modern physical models on which the argument depends are likely only covering (imperfectly) a minuscule part of that territory, and that the map may never be fully precise and complete regardless of technology (since a map that is fully precise and complete is the territory).
As a sibling comment put, the Scott Aaronson post has lots of interesting questions about this. Do the aliens who are watching us being simulated inside matrix think we are actually conscious? What if they freeze the program for 100 years, or run the computation encrypted, or if the 'computer' is just a human inside a room shuffling papers?
Is the computer simulation of a water drop wet ?
I found this article [0] very insightful, where they basically propose that consciousness is relative to whom you ask. We inside the simulation may attribute consciousness to each other. The aliens running it may not. What is relevant is the degree of isomorphism between our simulated brain processes and their real ones. So things will advance from all these back-and-forth nebulous arguments only when neuroscience becomes able to explain mechanistically why people claim to be conscious.
> If you think the answer might be no, then congratulations, you actually believe in immaterial souls
If you scan a body of water, and simulate it perfectly, the resulting simulation will not be wet. You can't separate a material process from the material completely. Consciousness may be a result of carbon being a substrate in the interactions. It might be because the brain is wet when those processes happen. There is plenty of room between believing a perfect computational simulation is not conscious and believing in immaterial souls.
Robert Kuhn is a really impressive dude. I've been occasionally running across his videos on YT from these interviews. I'm very impressed that he's rolling it all up into a written research project as well.
"I have discussed consciousness with over 200 scientists and philosophers who work on or think about consciousness and related fields (Closer To Truth YouTube; Closer To Truth website)."
What a massive and impressive coverage. The author, Robert Kuhn of Closer to Truth (https://closertotruth.com), ends this beast with a request to readers:
> Feedback is appreciated, critique too—especially explanations or theories of consciousness not included, or not described accurately, or not classified properly; also, improvements of the classification typology.
I think RK would enjoy Humberto Maturana’s take on cognition and self-cognition. Maturana usually does not use the word “consciousness”.
Start with Maturana’s book with Francisco Valera:
Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realization of the Living (1970)
The appendix of this book is important (“The Nervous System”). Last few pages blew my brain or mind ;-)
Thinking about consciousness without thinking more deeply about temporality is one problem most (or perhaps even all) models of consciousness still have.
Since Robert Kuhn works in thalamocortical activity the theme of timing should resonant.
Vedic philosophy has an interesting take on the problem of consciousness.
It take consciousness to be emanating from particles the size of atoms. They word those atomic particles as 'atma' ( in english souls, some even call it spiriton!).Those particles are fundamental to the universe and indivisible like quarks, bosons etc. Like radiation emanating from sun, it handles consciousness as 'emanating' from soul.
Each and every living being starting from size of a cell has a soul feeling (partially) about mechanisms of its body. A multi-cellular organism is then explained as a universe in itself where millions of cells with souls are thriving. The organism will then contain a 'chief soul' directing the working of whole body (which will be us case of humans). Further the philosophy expands this concept to the real universe in which all organisms with their individual consciousness are directed by a chief 'super consciousness'( in Vedic terminology it is termed as paramatma, some translate that as equal to God Concept)
Although then it further expands by saying that there are infinite (almost) parallel universes but that's other thing...
That's a nice story but does it make any testable predictions? Because it appears to introduce many new concepts that would be measurable with particle physics, yet mysteriously have never been observed. And if these magic soul particles don't interact with matter in measurable ways, how do you know their size?
Two things I'm absolutely convinced of at this point.
1. Consciousness is primitive. That is, interior experience is a fundamental property of the universe: any information system in the universe that has certain properties has an interior experience,
2. Within the human population, interior experience varies vastly between individuals.
Assertion 1 is informed though reading, introspection, meditation, and psychedelic experience. I've transitions the whole spectrum of being a die hard physical materialist to high conviction that consciousness is primitive. I'm not traditionally panpsychic, which most commonly postulates that every bit of matter has some level of conscious experience. I really think information and information processing is the fundamental unit (realized as certain configurations of matter) and certain information system's (e.g. our brain) have an interior experience.
Assertion 2 is informed through discussion with others. Denial of Chalmer's hard problem doesn't make sense to me. Like it seems logically flawed to argue that consciousness is emergent. Interior experience can't "emerge" from the traditional laws of physics, it's like a nonsense argument. The observation that folks really challenge this makes me deeply believe that the interior experience across humans is not at all uniform. The interior experience of somebody who vehemently denies the hard problem must be so much different from my interior experience to the extend that the divide can't be bridged.
> The interior experience of somebody who vehemently denies the hard problem must be so much different from my interior experience to the extend that the divide can't be bridged.
Internal experiences are probably a bit different, but it's a mistake to think this is the only reason to deny the hard problem. We all experience perceptual illusions of various types, auditory, visual, etc. In other words, perceptions are useful but deeply flawed. Why do you think your perceptions of subjective, qualitative experience doesn't have these same issues? I see no factual reason to treat them differently, therefore I simply don't naively trust what my perception of conscious experience suggests might be true, eg. that subjective experience is cohesive, without gaps, ineliminable, ineffable, etc.
Once you accept this fact, the hard problem starts looking a lot like a god of the gaps.
Assertion 1 is quite weak. The stronger version is that consciousness is the mechanism by which the universe processes information, and choice (as we experience it) is the mechanism by which the universe updates its state. Under this assertion, the laws of physics are nothing more than an application of the central limit theorem on the distribution of conscious choices made by all the little bits of the universe involved in the system. This view also implies that space and reality are "virtual" or "imaginary" much like George Berkeley suggested 300 years ago.
I also incline to the view that experience is fundamental, but I'm not really sure that you mean by the term "information system". Who is deciding what counts as information? In everyday usage we usually speak of something containing information if it helps a person decide how to act. Perhaps agency is one of these "certain" properties that these special information systems need to possess. There does seem to be a lot of overlap between things that we grant the assumption of consciousness to and things that we grant some form of agency to.
Kuhn's compendium of theories is very comprehensive in many of the philosophical areas but could be more detailed in section 9.3 on Electromagnetic field theories, which is my favourite.
This topic is so interesting. If I were creating a system for everything, it seems like empty space needs awareness of anything it could expand to contain, so all things would be aware of all other things as a base universal conscious hitbox.
You don't need empty space. All the processing power can be tied to entities, and space emerges from relationships between entities.
Want something fun to think about? What if the Heisenberg uncertainty principle is basically a function of the information capacity of the thing being examined. To make a computer analogy, imagine you have 8 bits of information - using 6 for position leaves 2 momentum, for example.
This is a wonderful project, I had no idea there was so much fragmentation n the topic of consciousness. Maybe we should feed these writings and concepts to AI and ask it to give us any grand unifying commonality among them, if any.
I would love to be wrong about this, but I don't think anyone knows how to do that yet. You're basically asking for automatic most-likely hypothesis generation given a set of input data. Concepts about consciousness in this case, but you could imagine doing the same with scientific data, system traces around bugs and crashes, etc. That would be wild!
It's precisely the type of thing that current LLMs are not suited for. They excel at extrapolating between existing writings and ideas. They do really poorly when trying to do something novel.
[+] [-] tasty_freeze|1 year ago|reply
(quote)
(endquote)Point 2 is textbook begging the question: it imagines a world which is physically identical to ours but consciousness is different there. That is baking in the presupposition that consciousness is not a physical process. Points 3 and 4 then "cleverly" detect the very contradiction he has planted and claims victory.
[+] [-] codeflo|1 year ago|reply
To illustrate this point, here's an argument with the same structure that would similarly "prove" that gravity doesn't cause things to fall down:
1. In our world, there is gravity and things fall down.
2. There is a logically possible world where there is gravity yet things do not fall down.
3. Therefore, things falling down is a further fact about our world, over and above gravity.
4. So, gravity causing things to fall down is false.
[+] [-] sireat|1 year ago|reply
The question is where does that subjective 0.01% - the rider on top of the elephant come from?
We generally do not pay attention to walking, breathing or brushing teeth and so on.
We can do more complex tasks as well once we achieve unconscious mastery in some subject.
With proper training we can play chess or tennis ("The Inner Game of Tennis") at a high level, without paying attention. In fact it can be detrimental to think about one's performance.
It is the Dennett's "multiple drafts model" - but where does the subjective experience arise when some model is brought to foreground "thread"?
Thus allure of Chalmer's zombies. Why not have a 100% zombie?
There are many stories of people seemingly being conscious, yet not really.
Black out drunks driving home from a bar.
Hypoglycemic shock is another example - my wife's diabetic friend was responding seemingly logically and claiming to be conscious, yet she was not and paramedics were barely able to save her.
A human being can achieve very high levels on unconscious mastery in multiple subjects.
A very tired me gave a remote lecture (on intermediate Python) during Covid where I switched spoken languages mid-lecture and even answered questions in a different language. Meanwhile I was was half asleep and thinking about a different subject matter. I was not really aware of the lecture material - I had given the same lecture many times before - I was on autopilot.
Only after watching the Zoom recording I realized what had happened.
Thus, are there are some actions that our zombie (unconscious) states unable to produce?
Presumably, subjective experience helps in planning future actions. That could be one avenue to explore.
[+] [-] theptip|1 year ago|reply
If there was no conscious experience in this identical p-zombie world, it would be impossible to explain why everybody falsely claims they have conscious experience. If people stop claiming this, then the world is physically different, as people no longer act and produce artifacts such as HN posts discussing the phenomenon.
Or, my summary would be: conscious experience is causal, and so you cannot get the same universe-wide effects without it.
[+] [-] patrickmay|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] hackinthebochs|1 year ago|reply
It's not begging the question. He gives reasons for (2) that support the premise. That the premise essentially leads inexorably to (4) is a feature of the argument structure, not a bug. You have to engage with his reasons for (2) in determining whether or not the argument succeeds.
[+] [-] andoando|1 year ago|reply
I can certainly imagine a robot that imitates all of human behaviors. If you hit it, it goes "Ow" and retracts, if you ask it if its conscious it says "yes". We can this imagine being created out of our completely physical electrical components, so the question becomes what is the difference between the imitation of consciousness and the consciousness we experience? This is interesting as in this day and age, we can totally imagine building such a robot, yet we'd have a tough time believing it is actually conscious.
Now, whether you are a materialist or not depends entirely on whether or not you believe conscious experience like yours can emerge out of physical components.
My take on this is: Materialism/physicalism is ill defined and materialism/physicalism and dualism are compatible. We consider completely mysterious properties like energy and now even randomness (things happen one way or another for no reason) as being fundamental physical facts about the universe. Theoretically, how does this differ from saying consciousness is a fundamental physical property?
Moreover, you have to consider the fact that the "material" world IS an imagination of the mind. Whatever facts or attributes we assign to being material is limited to the mental facilities of the brain.
At the end of the day, the question is, what fundamental facts do we need to explain the observations that we make? I can observe that I feel, see, hear things. Can the fundamental facts of the current physics model explain this? No? Then we must add to it an additional property, making it part of the standard physics model. If you want proof, you must either A. explain how consciousness can emerge out of existing known "material" processes, B. Admit consciousness as a "material" property and define the process by which it combines, reduces, etc. (the combination problem of panpsychism)
[+] [-] naasking|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] root_axis|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] mensetmanusman|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] goatlover|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] FrustratedMonky|1 year ago|reply
"Point 2 is textbook begging the question"
-> It is a thought experiment.
He is proposing a possible postulate to spur talking about the ideas. It isn't a 'proof'.
Just like we don't argue with Schrodinger about the absurdity of a half dead cat.
[+] [-] amelius|1 year ago|reply
So a world where people discuss consciousness but where it does not exist? That sounds very implausible.
[+] [-] nabla9|1 year ago|reply
Physicalism is conditionally false.
If p-zombies are logically incoherent, the consciousness does not exist. It's an illusion. This is the argument by Daniel Dennet. We are zombies.
I mean it's obvious to any physicalist that we don't really feel anything. There is no I, soul, no suffering in a in a rock, peas soup, or a human. It's all physical process.
[+] [-] sornen|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] Animats|1 year ago|reply
This is theology. What's it doing in Elsevier's "Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology"?
Most of the classical arguments in this area are now obsolete. The classic big question, presented in the article, was, “Out of meat, how do you get thought?". That's no longer so mysterious. You get some basic processing elements from molecular biology. The puzzle, for a long time, was, can a large number of basic processing elements with no overall design self-organize into intelligence. Then came LLMs, which do exactly that.
[+] [-] codeflo|1 year ago|reply
If you think the answer might be no, then congratulations, you actually believe in immaterial souls, no matter how materialist or rationalist you otherwise claim to be.
[+] [-] vundercind|1 year ago|reply
For the distinction, consider the difference between a simulation of a simple chemical process in a computer—even a perfectly accurate one!—and the actual thing happening. Is the thing going on in the computer the same? No, no matter how perfect the simulation. It’s a little electricity moving around, looking nothing whatsoever like the real thing. The simulation is meaning that we impose on that electricity moving around.
That being the case, this reduces to “if we recreate the matter and state exactly, for-real, is that consciousness?” in which case yeah, sure, probably so.
This doesn’t work if the thing running the simulation requires interpretation.
[+] [-] root_axis|1 year ago|reply
It is actually ruled out by the uncertainty principle. A simulation with perfect fidelity is not a simulation, it's the thing itself.
[+] [-] basil-rash|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] QuadmasterXLII|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] birktj|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] strogonoff|1 year ago|reply
The most obvious objection is that perceived time-space is a map of some fundamentally inaccessible to us territory, that modern physical models on which the argument depends are likely only covering (imperfectly) a minuscule part of that territory, and that the map may never be fully precise and complete regardless of technology (since a map that is fully precise and complete is the territory).
[+] [-] filipezf|1 year ago|reply
I found this article [0] very insightful, where they basically propose that consciousness is relative to whom you ask. We inside the simulation may attribute consciousness to each other. The aliens running it may not. What is relevant is the degree of isomorphism between our simulated brain processes and their real ones. So things will advance from all these back-and-forth nebulous arguments only when neuroscience becomes able to explain mechanistically why people claim to be conscious.
[0] A Relativistic Theory of Consciousness. https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10....
[+] [-] unknown|1 year ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] grishka|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] igleria|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] BobbyJo|1 year ago|reply
If you scan a body of water, and simulate it perfectly, the resulting simulation will not be wet. You can't separate a material process from the material completely. Consciousness may be a result of carbon being a substrate in the interactions. It might be because the brain is wet when those processes happen. There is plenty of room between believing a perfect computational simulation is not conscious and believing in immaterial souls.
[+] [-] amelius|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] mistermann|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] detourdog|1 year ago|reply
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40466814 The paper is linked and disused in this thread. Her description of the void before having language is eye opening.
[+] [-] pmayrgundter|1 year ago|reply
"I have discussed consciousness with over 200 scientists and philosophers who work on or think about consciousness and related fields (Closer To Truth YouTube; Closer To Truth website)."
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLFJr3pJl27pJKWEUWv9X5...
https://www.youtube.com/@CloserToTruthTV/videos
[+] [-] robwwilliams|1 year ago|reply
> Feedback is appreciated, critique too—especially explanations or theories of consciousness not included, or not described accurately, or not classified properly; also, improvements of the classification typology.
I think RK would enjoy Humberto Maturana’s take on cognition and self-cognition. Maturana usually does not use the word “consciousness”.
Start with Maturana’s book with Francisco Valera:
Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realization of the Living (1970)
The appendix of this book is important (“The Nervous System”). Last few pages blew my brain or mind ;-)
Thinking about consciousness without thinking more deeply about temporality is one problem most (or perhaps even all) models of consciousness still have.
Since Robert Kuhn works in thalamocortical activity the theme of timing should resonant.
[+] [-] kkoncevicius|1 year ago|reply
How can we tell if another person is conscious or not?
As far as I see, this is not possible and will never be possible. Hence the "hard problem".
[+] [-] utkarsh858|1 year ago|reply
It take consciousness to be emanating from particles the size of atoms. They word those atomic particles as 'atma' ( in english souls, some even call it spiriton!).Those particles are fundamental to the universe and indivisible like quarks, bosons etc. Like radiation emanating from sun, it handles consciousness as 'emanating' from soul.
Each and every living being starting from size of a cell has a soul feeling (partially) about mechanisms of its body. A multi-cellular organism is then explained as a universe in itself where millions of cells with souls are thriving. The organism will then contain a 'chief soul' directing the working of whole body (which will be us case of humans). Further the philosophy expands this concept to the real universe in which all organisms with their individual consciousness are directed by a chief 'super consciousness'( in Vedic terminology it is termed as paramatma, some translate that as equal to God Concept) Although then it further expands by saying that there are infinite (almost) parallel universes but that's other thing...
[+] [-] Thiez|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] brotchie|1 year ago|reply
Assertion 2 is informed through discussion with others. Denial of Chalmer's hard problem doesn't make sense to me. Like it seems logically flawed to argue that consciousness is emergent. Interior experience can't "emerge" from the traditional laws of physics, it's like a nonsense argument. The observation that folks really challenge this makes me deeply believe that the interior experience across humans is not at all uniform. The interior experience of somebody who vehemently denies the hard problem must be so much different from my interior experience to the extend that the divide can't be bridged.
[+] [-] naasking|1 year ago|reply
Internal experiences are probably a bit different, but it's a mistake to think this is the only reason to deny the hard problem. We all experience perceptual illusions of various types, auditory, visual, etc. In other words, perceptions are useful but deeply flawed. Why do you think your perceptions of subjective, qualitative experience doesn't have these same issues? I see no factual reason to treat them differently, therefore I simply don't naively trust what my perception of conscious experience suggests might be true, eg. that subjective experience is cohesive, without gaps, ineliminable, ineffable, etc.
Once you accept this fact, the hard problem starts looking a lot like a god of the gaps.
[+] [-] CuriouslyC|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] o_nate|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] someoldgit|1 year ago|reply
Another up to date compilation of 15 articles on Electromagnetic Field Theories of Consciousness: Opportunities and Obstacles is available here https://www.frontiersin.org/research-topics/18437/electromag...
One of the authors (Joachim Keppler) has a very interesting recent paper here https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/human-neuroscience/arti...
[+] [-] cut3|1 year ago|reply
Panpsychism seems neat to think about.
[+] [-] CuriouslyC|1 year ago|reply
Want something fun to think about? What if the Heisenberg uncertainty principle is basically a function of the information capacity of the thing being examined. To make a computer analogy, imagine you have 8 bits of information - using 6 for position leaves 2 momentum, for example.
[+] [-] bzmrgonz|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] bubblyworld|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] russdill|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] poikroequ|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] superb_dev|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] dcre|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] cantorshegel2|1 year ago|reply