Comment by storus
6 days ago
This article had absolutely no proof of its statements and all it did was use past allegories. We are definitely missing something in our understanding of the world, like before we knew about electromagnetism or radioactivity. There are some mechanisms we know about that contribute to the knowledge of self that become exposed by conditions like Depersonalization/Derealization disorder from certain neurons in inflammatory environment, making one feel detached from their own body, feeling like they control a videogame character instead. Yet that still doesn't tell where does the "self" come from.
Over time I've found that by far the highest ROI move in a consciousness debate is to simply ask "Oh, interesting. How do you know that?" and watch everyone on all sides flounder. It's one of the few places where otherwise smart people make confident statements that they don't even realize they can't support until they're asked to try. The intuitions are so strong that they seem to swamp reason.
This has caused my own position, over time, to be a deep agnosticism about what's actually going on.
The major reason for the never-ending disagreements on the nature of consciousness is that pretty much 100% of the time no-one ever rigorously defines what (things) they are actually talking about, and the word is so overloaded and poorly defined that any discussion therefore devolves into people talking about different things, as well as the discussion being so vague as to be meaningless.
There are of course other reasons too, with things like religious beliefs and human ego meaning that people come to the discussion with a major bias and fixed views rather than even being open to any rational discussion.
Finally, everyone is conscious and has an opinion, but only a tiny fraction are actually knowledgeable about the brain and have spent any large amount of time thinking about things like evolution and brain development .. they have an opinion, but are just not qualified to discuss it!
If you break down all the different things that people are referring to when they talk about "consciousness", and define them individually with as little wiggle room as the english language and underlying taxonomy of concepts allows, then I really don't think there is much mystery about consciousness at all, but of course those with an agenda who want there to be a mystery will still argue about every part of it including the definitions that remove all the wiggle room.
The nature of consciousness has long been a contentious subject, and one of interest, but it seems that the rise of AI has intensified the discussion with the new question being whether AI is or could be conscious. I do think this can be answered in a principled way (=yes), but in the end you can only PROVE that something, or someone else, is conscious if you accept a functional/testable definition of it in the first place.
One can build scientific theories without rigorously defining terms: a stipulative definition is enough.
Best example is Darwin's "Origin of Species"; here, Darwin didn't rigorously define "species": 'No one definition has as yet satisfied all naturalists; yet every naturalist knows vaguely what he means when he speaks of a species.'
Many in the social sciences fetishize definitions, operating under the false notion that formulating a precise definition is the primary goal of inquiry. In reality, a robust scientific theory is a structured set of hypotheses; when combined with auxiliary theories, it derives a specific set of testable consequences.
Even within this framework, one must remain vigilant against ad hoc explanations. An ad hoc explanation fails to provide genuine systemic insight because it is engineered solely to fit the target phenomenon; it eliminates the explanatory gap by simply re-stating or absorbing the explanandum without offering any independent predictive or falsifiable power.
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> The major reason for the never-ending disagreements on the nature of consciousness is that pretty much 100% of the time no-one ever rigorously defines what (things) they are actually talking about, and the word is so overloaded and poorly defined that any discussion therefore devolves into people talking about different things, as well as the discussion being so vague as to be meaningless.
You're right, but that rigorous definition is a significant part of the problem. We have a very difficult time rigorously defining and then debating certain attributes about consciousness or related concepts precisely because the definition and exploration of the definition is what is being debated.
This makes it a very fascinating topic.
For my own pet theory I think consciousness as we like to understand it is an emergent and evolutionary social construct for cooperation amongst humans, and different people may have different levels of conscious thoughts, similar to how mammals are conscious in a different way amongst other species. It's a spectrum. There are, in fact, philosophical zombies.
> with things like religious beliefs and human ego meaning that people come to the discussion with a major bias and fixed views rather than even being open to any rational discussion.
You're forgetting that attempting to have a "rational" discussion is itself a bias inherited from the many centuries of intellectual development that occurred between the middle ages and now - the parts that the article conveniently skips over entirely.
The "debate" here doesn't function to generate an answer, but to narrow down the scope of the question into the very constrained domain. When ppl debate "consciousness" they are re-affirming their opinion that humans are inherently rational agents (hence "scire" -> "to know"), rather than agents that can live, feel, think and will, which would require a different term, like "soul".
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> they have an opinion, but are just not qualified to discuss it! … I really don't think there is much mystery about consciousness at all
Are you actually qualified to discuss this by your criteria?
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My best contribution to that sort of debate is experience with general anesthesia. I recall being in a disconnected state wondering idly if I had died of complications without any fear as I could not feel my heartbeat or embodied emotions. That implies a heavily embodied component to consciousness. It is all body so not quite dualism but it does provide some limited observational evidence of distinct components. Combine that with what I have heard about the mechanism of anesthesia working by disabling nerve transmission that suggests that a disembodied but supported brain which does not have neural access to sensory feedbacks would be rather stoic to emotionless.
That's nice. Do you have a go to for conversations with less mindful people or people without a training in meditation/mindfulness? For example, for people who have no experience and yet speak from a frame of strong identity and identification to their thoughts as though they are them, I like to ask "Who's the one who witnesses the thoughts?" and it kind of ties a brain-knot in their head.
Funny enough most people who don't want to meditate or practice mindfulness, also get dissuaded from the dissonance this brings up, and like the old me, just move on to more comfortable conversation.
From an internal perspective, thoughts are both the witness and the witnessed. The problem only comes when trying to apply our language which is firmly rooted in this artificial dualism.
"It's one of the few places where otherwise smart people make confident statements that they don't even realize they can't support until they're asked to try."
It's 'one' of the few places? That behaviorism seems to be define almost all modern discourse from politics to health care including about 95% of Hacker News posts as far as I can tell...
Certainty would definitely appear to be premature when we don’t understand the physical characteristics or causes of consciousness. Hell, we don’t quite yet understand a cell in good mechanical detail, much less the full body/mind of a primate. Don’t know is a reasonable posture, but of course the investigators get enthused with hypothesis generation and testing. That is their job and their karma is to over generalize each useful model.
Naturalistic theories tend to work better, and science is inching in towards the problem, so far it was naturalistic.
I still think we're looking for a shadow by shining a torch at it personally; we have a rather chauvinistic view on what consciousness 'ought' to look like and this fundamentally shapes what we're looking for. We assume that consciousness has to resemble human consciousness, something we can't even measure very well in people let alone extrapolate into other kinds of being.
For the sake of argument, let's take a particularly long-lived species and say oak trees have some form of awareness. An oak tree's perception of time would be completely out of line with ours, from its perspective it'd be this writhing, visibly expanding thing that can't even register individual humans since we're there for such a short period of its existence. If it were aware on some level, we wouldn't be able to tell either way because we can only really conceive of human-like minds; even though an 'oak tree mind' would look nothing like ours because it would be driven by entirely different evolutionary conditions. I don't think it's possible for us to be entirely objective when it comes to naturalistic theories of consciousness, we cannot avoid being biased by our 'version' of what we're studying.
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Work better in what sense? Do naturalistic theories have more predictive power?
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They know because of the algorithm:
Hear a thing and store it and the associated vibe - yay/nay.
Step 2:
Mindlessly repeat stored information and vibe when it feels appropriate.
Step 3:
Wait for somebody else to do the work of refuting/verifying your info + vibe.
Step 4:
Go to step 1.
When you realize this is what all people are doing almost all of the time (and many, all of the time), you are liberated.
I've always thought that the mechanisms there create the experience or the illusion of a continuous self or something in that direction. When you've experienced it breaking down (automatic actions happening before you remember deciding to do them is a big contributor to the floaty dream like effect) you start to think maybe there's several systems and the observation and memory parts are just making sense of them. We assemble a self by keeping those memories and experience in a very particular way.
Anil Seth calls the "hard problem" at best a distraction, or hand-waving to avoid answering what he calls the real problem: linking what we experience to the physical brain mechanisms.
In his theory, consciousness is a "controlled hallucination" about what is outside of us. Our senses serve to reinforce or correct the predictions our brains are making. (we have a serious latency issue)
You'll find he's saying a lot of the same things you just wrote.
Sounds also like Daniel Dennett.
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There is a very good explanation here - not what brains do, but what brains MUST do. Can we walk left and right at the same time? Can we drink coffee before brewing it? No. There is a bottleneck, a serial action bottleneck on the body. So the parallel brain activity must serialize on the output channel. It has to, or face ruin. If action is serialized in time by physical necessity, then information processing must also unify before action in order to support it. We must act as one -> we must cognize as one -> or perish. There is no way to allow each limb to do its own thing, or the brain not to decide what comes next in a unified way.
I doubt your conclusion that unified action needs unified mentation. One may take unified action without achieving unity of the contents of the brain. Acting with instantaneous regret if you will, flying by the seat of your pants, etc. The brain seems to be able to let competing subsystems alternate getting expressed in action.
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Can you state in plain terms what this actually means?
> There is no way to allow each limb to do its own thing, or the brain not to decide what comes next in a unified way.
This is of course not true. I’ve watched people trip over their own feet because the simultaneously tried to go both left and right. I’ve done it myself.
And this says nothing about consciousness. Most actions are not conscious.
> There is no way to allow each limb to do its own thing
I can pat my head and rub my belly at the same time.
If we're talking about consciousness then yes you can walk left/right at the same time. You can drink coffee before it's brewed.
There is no way to allow each limb to do its own thing
What? Why not?
It's physically possible in terms of limb motion. It's very difficult for most people to actually do, sure; but impossible?
or the brain not to decide what comes next in a unified way
There's the idea that a lot of the brain's "conscious decisions" are actually post-hoc rationalisations of unconscious decisions. If so, there's no reason those decisions have to be unified. Maybe the consciousness of the decision and its outcomes must be unified; maybe that's somehow connected to what consciousness really is. Or maybe not!
I don't think there's enough information to say.
And for that reason, we'll never discover the soul. It will perpetually be that "something" that we are missing in our understanding of things. Assume for a minute that we have the basic picture correct, that there is no non-physical soul: your belief would have us searching for the rest of time! Isn't it best to suspend the question?
There probably isn't any simple causative explanation (as in the example you provide). The brain is the most complex structure we know of and "self" arises from that deep complexity; this is an answer that I'm content with, as anything more in-depth / closer to the "metal" would quickly exceed my ability to understand it.
Maybe - let's assume that we could simulate a human brain to a high level of fidelity starting from a known good state and emulate its input and output. Do you think we could poke at it enough and ask the simulated person about their experience enough to discover the mechanisms behind what we experience as a soul? It's logistically and computationally insanely complex to pull off, but if we could build such a system, I don't see why we couldn't eventually figure it out in another thousand years' time (assuming we don't destroy ourselves or do something that sets back the evolution of technology massively between now and then).
This is what humanity will inevitably end up trying to do with computing, and a great argument for why we could be in a simulation.
MMAcevedo
> we'll never discover the soul
What if it reveals itself to us?
Agreed. The main reason we believe consciousness exists is because we all experience it. So it’s hard to deny.
“We experience it, therefore it exists” proves less than it seems. It proves there is an experience to explain. It does not prove that consciousness is what it appears to be from the inside. A mirage is still seen, but the thing it seems to show is not really there. Consciousness might be real in that same limited sense, while our folk model of it could be deeply wrong.
This is a really good point and something that I think is important to clarify at the very start of the discussion. In that way, I'm less interested in explaining consciousness than explaining experience. When I read this article, I felt like the author was only making his points by convoluting the two. By the end, I felt like, for an expert on the subject, I don't think he actually groks the fundamental point.
Sleep paralysis entered the chat
I think the article has an interesting argument here. We also "experience" the sun going up and down in the sky. But actually this is an illusion of our vantage point on a spinning rock.
We don't experience the sun going up and down, we experience its direction changing relative to the horizontal plane, and it is not an illusion: it matches planetary motion. The mistake arises when interpreting the raw experience. Sensations don't lie. Another example: Metal feels colder than plastic, but the sensation is right again: you are loosing more heat when touching metal.
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But the debate isn't whether consciousness exists. It's largely whether it's the product of normal neurons doing their thing or something more. Also the details of how it works of course.
It cannot be just a product of the body, else it could not have effect on the body and our tongues could not be moving speaking about it.
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Your arguments reminds me of logical loop. A implies B, B implies A. It doesn't mean that A and B are true. You have to be conscious to experience and to be conscious means to to experience. Maybe we are not conscious after all and do not experience? Maybe it is just a lie we are telling ourselves?
>> The main reason we believe consciousness exists is because we all experience it.
What about the NPC meme? LLMs behave like NPCs, and some people seem no more conscious than an NPC (I didn't invent that meme).
NPC meme?
No sir, we are a little more high brow around here. Around these parts we talk about p-zombies and solipsism!
I'll bite though, do NPCs behave as if they believe they are conscious? If so, how do you know you aren't one of them?
Isn't that just an insult people throw around? Or maybe some psychopath that tries to justify their worldview.
I have never had an conversation with someone who seems like an NPC.
As a philosophical zombie, I have to disagree here.
This is why the comparison to people’s reactions to Darwin/evolution is just wrong - people had thought experimented things that looked like evolution, but when we were able to measure it we could start linking it to the real physical world. AFAIK consciousness is the only thing that we know for certain is real, but have no way of measuring it. People are still conscious when they lose sense of self, and blacking out or surgical sedatives might be related to memory more than losing consciousness, these affect qualities of consciousness but aren’t consciousness itself. This article reads like “I f’ing love science” level thinking, saying people are ignorant for thinking consciousness is not just a physical process, but zero understanding of scientific process.
Come to Consciousness conference, its where the hard problem started. https://cs2026.org/
My comment was going to say something similar. It starts like: hey, think this, it is time to think this full stop I say so.
the proof of our lack of understanding is the countless things we can measure but cannot explain.
Good on point response in my opinion. A lot of people want to close doors because those doors being open makes them uncomfortable. This is a mistake. If you want to be rigorous about what is then you need to be equally rigorous about what is not.
You are asking for evidence of absence, and that is the entire point. We don't understand brains, therefore this one specific theoretical feature (consciousness) must exist. Why should we stubbornly endorse a tautology for which there is no evidence?
Experience is subjective. That's why we need science in the first place.
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