The Hard Problem of Consciousness

Philosophy is a hobby of mine. I don't pretend to be good at it, but I really enjoy it. Lately the hard problem of consciousness has been occupying much of my spare time.

Basically the hard problem of consciousness is why is there experience? Why is there a subjective point of view?

If you really think about it, there is no obvious reason why you need consciousness to go about your life as a human. Practically everything you do happens on a level you are not conscious of. When someone speaks to you your brain interprets what they say without any conscious effort. Your brain is constantly processing information from your senses that you are not consciously aware of. Experimental data even seems to reveal that the decisions we make are made subconsciously moments before the conscious self becomes aware of the decision.

So why even have that last step of being consciously aware of what your brain is doing? Why aren't we just really complicated organic machines. Why are "the lights on"?

And an equally difficult question to answer is how? How do the purely physical processes of your brain result in what feels to be a non-physical consciousness? It is easy to imagine how the firing of neurons causes muscles to move and organs to do their work and to cause reaction to stimuli. We may not understand all the pathways but it is easy to theorize what they might be and how they might act. I can even imagine biologically how the people I interact with every day could do everything they do without them being conscious. Philosophical zombies is the term, I think. But it is hard to even theorize a mechanism for how the subjective experience of consciousness could emerge from that physical interaction of neurons.

Lots of scientists avoid the question altogether. Or perhaps they dismiss it by saying that consciousness is just an illusion. But it seems to me that consciousness is the one thing in the universe that CAN'T be an illusion. I could be a brain in a vat being fooled into thinking I am living in this universe, typing on this computer right now. But I can't deny the fact that I am conscious. My sense of self might be an illusion, but consciousness itself can't be.

There does appear to be a two-way interaction between my consciousness and the physical processes of my brain. After all, if I put things like alcohol or weed into my system, it alters the nature of my consciousness. And the mere fact that I am sitting here addressing the hard problem of consciousness means that my physical brain is aware that consciousness exists and is aware what subjective experience feels like, otherwise it wouldn't even occur to my brain to make this thread.

I'll stop there to see if this thread gets any traction.

Skeptic Bob said:

Philosophy is a hobby of mine. I don't pretend to be good at it, but I really enjoy it. Lately the hard problem of consciousness has been occupying much of my spare time.

Basically the hard problem of consciousness is why is there experience? Why is there a subjective point of view?

If you really think about it, there is no obvious reason why you need consciousness to go about your life as a human. Practically everything you do happens on a level you are not conscious of. When someone speaks to you your brain interprets what they say without any conscious effort. Your brain is constantly processing information from your senses that you are not consciously aware of. Experimental data even seems to reveal that the decisions we make are made subconsciously moments before the conscious self becomes aware of the decision.

So why even have that last step of being consciously aware of what your brain is doing? Why aren't we just really complicated organic machines. Why are "the lights on"?

And an equally difficult question to answer is how? How do the purely physical processes of your brain result in what feels to be a non-physical consciousness? It is easy to imagine how the firing of neurons causes muscles to move and organs to do their work and to cause reaction to stimuli. We may not understand all the pathways but it is easy to theorize what they might be and how they might act. I can even imagine biologically how the people I interact with every day could do everything they do without them being conscious. Philosophical zombies is the term, I think. But it is hard to even theorize a mechanism for how the subjective experience of consciousness could emerge from that physical interaction of neurons.

Lots of scientists avoid the question altogether. Or perhaps they dismiss it by saying that consciousness is just an illusion. But it seems to me that consciousness is the one thing in the universe that CAN'T be an illusion. I could be a brain in a vat being fooled into thinking I am living in this universe, typing on this computer right now. But I can't deny the fact that I am conscious. My sense of self might be an illusion, but consciousness itself can't be.

There does appear to be a two-way interaction between my consciousness and the physical processes of my brain. After all, if I put things like alcohol or weed into my system, it alters the nature of my consciousness. And the mere fact that I am sitting here addressing the hard problem of consciousness means that my physical brain is aware that consciousness exists and is aware what subjective experience feels like, otherwise it wouldn't even occur to my brain to make this thread.

I'll stop there to see if this thread gets any traction.

Click to expand...

Think of consciousness as side effect of having a large organic neural computer in your head. The multiple processes computing continuously manifested inside your mind, the process you call consciousness is what could best be described as the error correction/task optimizer.

Skeptic Bob said:

Philosophy is a hobby of mine. I don't pretend to be good at it, but I really enjoy it. Lately the hard problem of consciousness has been occupying much of my spare time.

Basically the hard problem of consciousness is why is there experience? Why is there a subjective point of view?

If you really think about it, there is no obvious reason why you need consciousness to go about your life as a human. Practically everything you do happens on a level you are not conscious of. When someone speaks to you your brain interprets what they say without any conscious effort. Your brain is constantly processing information from your senses that you are not consciously aware of. Experimental data even seems to reveal that the decisions we make are made subconsciously moments before the conscious self becomes aware of the decision.

So why even have that last step of being consciously aware of what your brain is doing? Why aren't we just really complicated organic machines. Why are "the lights on"?

And an equally difficult question to answer is how? How do the purely physical processes of your brain result in what feels to be a non-physical consciousness? It is easy to imagine how the firing of neurons causes muscles to move and organs to do their work and to cause reaction to stimuli. We may not understand all the pathways but it is easy to theorize what they might be and how they might act. I can even imagine biologically how the people I interact with every day could do everything they do without them being conscious. Philosophical zombies is the term, I think. But it is hard to even theorize a mechanism for how the subjective experience of consciousness could emerge from that physical interaction of neurons.

Lots of scientists avoid the question altogether. Or perhaps they dismiss it by saying that consciousness is just an illusion. But it seems to me that consciousness is the one thing in the universe that CAN'T be an illusion. I could be a brain in a vat being fooled into thinking I am living in this universe, typing on this computer right now. But I can't deny the fact that I am conscious. My sense of self might be an illusion, but consciousness itself can't be.

There does appear to be a two-way interaction between my consciousness and the physical processes of my brain. After all, if I put things like alcohol or weed into my system, it alters the nature of my consciousness. And the mere fact that I am sitting here addressing the hard problem of consciousness means that my physical brain is aware that consciousness exists and is aware what subjective experience feels like, otherwise it wouldn't even occur to my brain to make this thread.

I'll stop there to see if this thread gets any traction.

Click to expand...

I say that your sense of self, The Ego that so many hold so dearly....hold onto so dearly that they deny reality all too often....is an illusion, and that consciousness is life. But see consciousness is not A THING, it is infinite, the better we get at life the more conscious we become, or really the more layers of consciousness we can access enjoy and use. Even after decades of Zen training we still feel what we call the self, the Ego, and we still make use of the ego as we go about our days, but over time it gets trained, it is no longer allowed to get in the way of life...consciousness.

The big question is how do we deepen consciousness, how do we get better at life, and I say that this is what education is for, and I most certainly do not mean the now very failed University.

PirateMk1 said:

Think of consciousness as side effect of having a large organic neural computer in your head. The multiple processes computing continuously manifested inside your mind, the process you call consciousness is what could best be described as the error correction/task optimizer.

Click to expand...

But why would subjective experience be needed for such an error correcting/task optimizer? It doesn't seem that consciousness is needed for decision making seeing as how the vast majority of decision making our brain does is done subconsciously. In fact, depending on how short you set the lag, ALL decision making is probably done subconsciously and then momentarily later becomes known to the conscious mind.

It doesn't seem as though there is anything the brain does that actually would require that last step of becoming consciously aware. So we are left just saying it is a byproduct or side effect. But all other byproducts or side effects or emergent qualities still have a theoretically plausible mechanism for how they come to be. No matter how hard I try I can't seem to conceive of such a mechanism that would even theoretically result in subjective experience. I can understand an organism acting like it has subjective experience, but to actually have it boggles the mind.

I am not a dualist. But I do feel like there may be a fundamental property of the universe we may be missing. There are certain properties of the universe that are irreducible, that we just accept as fundamental. Space, time, gravity, energy. Maybe there is another fundamental that when matter is arranged in a particular way or information is process in a certain way, consciousness just arises. Maybe a much, MUCH more basic form of consciousness exists at all levels. Maybe there is something that it is "like" to be an electron that is different than what it is like to be non-existent and that difference is consciousness at the most fundamental.

I'm not saying I believe that, but it is an idea that has been thrown around in philosophy. It is called panpsychism. Another theory I have encountered is the integrated information theory of consciousness.

None of them really satisfy me. I just feel like there is something missing in every possible explanation I hear. No matter how you arrange the atoms, I just don't see the connection in how qualia emerges.

If consciousness is a part of the universe then it follows it would not need man to exist, just as space, time, gravity, and energy do not need man. So it seems as if consciousness is not exactly part of the universe, but something man thinks about due to the nature of how the human brain functions.

I have a theory that consciousness is a by-product from the development of humans as social animals. Having empathy requires taking information and processing it to find out what it means from another's perspective. The experience of empathy, and therefore of consciousness allowed us to bond on a large scale, and communities and lead to evolutionary success. Consciousness is also found in other social mammals, most strongly in whales and dolphins, who also share the concept of community, and in birds, again, most strongly in species that form lasting social bonds over a large scale. Social animals without conscious bonding generally rely on pheromones and other sensory excretions to know one another.

I'd imagine consciousness developed the same way any physical trait developed: evolution. A random mutation made a living thing aware of itself. This mutation must have then caused a benefit to survival and/or ability to reproduce. My guess that it was in the early stages of life, given the multitude of species that exhibit consciousness.

I can think of a number of reasons that being conscious would be better for survival over the grunting food/sex/shelter rival organic machines. Getting that extra layer would have been nothing more than the next step in genetic evolution.

Unfortunately, far too many people are far too concerned with "why" and not "how". They want there to be a reason why something happened. They want there to be a purpose. That is an unjustified assumption. I don't care why it's true, I care that it's true and clearly in this case, it is. People need to stop noodling their navels and just deal with reality.

Skeptic Bob said:

Lots of scientists avoid the question altogether. Or perhaps they dismiss it by saying that consciousness is just an illusion. But it seems to me that consciousness is the one thing in the universe that CAN'T be an illusion. I could be a brain in a vat being fooled into thinking I am living in this universe, typing on this computer right now. But I can't deny the fact that I am conscious. My sense of self might be an illusion, but consciousness itself can't be.

Click to expand...

I actually wrote a hard sci-fi novel about this that I'm in the process of editing. It takes place in the year 2119 and humanity has journeyed as far as Alpha Centauri, yet the planets have formed their own nation-states, and there is a war between Jupiter and Mars. Transhumanism has given rise to a "second humanity," with humans on Miranda evolving into the Mir, become asexual and opened their third-eye. There's also the lofty Jovians who are basically the "Nordic" species from Ufology, averaging 6'6 to 7' and superior physically and all are traditionally blonde-haired and blue-eyed. Titan and the moons of Saturn are controlled by the Titan Corporation, which wields an army of war machines large enough to threaten Earth (which is basically the U.S. of the future). The Earth Assembly (E.A.) partners with the Jovian monarchy to launch an expedition in the 2100's to find the origin of consciousness (to create true AI competent enough to beat back the Titan Bots). When nobody returns, they find their remains beyond the orbit of Pluto, where they find a hidden planet that turns out to be a black tetrahedron made of an unknown metaphysical, indestructible alloy. When it activates, the squadron known as Templar is transported millions of lightyears away into a superstructure at the center of the Great Attractor, which they then find out is the Great Attractor, but only after they awaken an ancient alliance of various species of Reptilians that essentially evolved from a cerebral contagion (referring to Noam Chomsky's views of human intelligence as a lethal mutation and that the reptilian brain is in fact a DNA virus that corrupted primates, mammalians and aquatics for generations) which are themselves being directed by an even more expansive and nigh-omnipotent supercomputer calling itself the "Tetragrammaton"...

spud_meister said:

I have a theory that consciousness is a by-product from the development of humans as social animals. Having empathy requires taking information and processing it to find out what it means from another's perspective. The experience of empathy, and therefore of consciousness allowed us to bond on a large scale, and communities and lead to evolutionary success. Consciousness is also found in other social mammals, most strongly in whales and dolphins, who also share the concept of community, and in birds, again, most strongly in species that form lasting social bonds over a large scale. Social animals without conscious bonding generally rely on pheromones and other sensory excretions to know one another.

Click to expand...

Compelling theory. I can certainly see the advantage of empathy in a social species. But it still leaves me with the problem of why consciousness is required for such empathy. All those social cues are interpreted at the subconscious level before you become consciously aware of their impact. It seems you can just cut out the step of being conscious and the brain can decide to act based on the cues it receives from its sensory input. I feel the end result would be the same. Your brain picks up on the fact your friend is sad before you are consciously aware of it. Your brain decides to go comfort your friend before you are consciously aware of the decision to go comfort your friend. Your brain subconsciously goes through your memories in search of something that will cheer them up, and your brain instructs your mouth and vocal chords to produce the output.

That is of course an oversimplification. Thousands of things happen in the brain for any particular action. But it isn't apparent why consciousness or subjective experience is necessary for any of those actions to occur.

fredmertzz said:

I'd imagine consciousness developed the same way any physical trait developed: evolution. A random mutation made a living thing aware of itself. This mutation must have then caused a benefit to survival and/or ability to reproduce. My guess that it was in the early stages of life, given the multitude of species that exhibit consciousness.

I can think of a number of reasons that being conscious would be better for survival over the grunting food/sex/shelter rival organic machines. Getting that extra layer would have been nothing more than the next step in genetic evolution.

Click to expand...

Our brain is certainly a product of evolution. And mutations can affect the number, arrangement, and nature of the neurons in our brain. More and more neuronal connections have been accumulated as our species has evolved to be more and more intelligent. It is easy to imagine how such changes lead to more processing power, problem solving abilities, and social structures.

We can imagine how such actions would work. The brain calculates a better solution to a problem than it would have have been able to do prior to a given mutation. The brain triggers specific muscles to act in conjunction with sensory input to act on this calculated solution. But at no point can such a mutation explain how these physical processes result in the non-physical, subjective experience.

To me it seems there is nothing humans do that couldn't be accomplished without consciousness. Hell, the subconscious handles around 99% of the workload already. And I would even argue that the few things your conscious self handles are first handled by the subconscious.

In fact, the only thing I can think of that the human brain couldn't conceivably do without input from your consciousness is, in fact, think about consciousness.

Cephus said:

Unfortunately, far too many people are far too concerned with "why" and not "how". They want there to be a reason why something happened. They want there to be a purpose. That is an unjustified assumption. I don't care why it's true, I care that it's true and clearly in this case, it is. People need to stop noodling their navels and just deal with reality.

Click to expand...

Don't get me wrong, when it comes to consciousness I am far more interested in "how". What is the mechanism by which subjective conscious experience emerges from purely physical processes. Not only do I think that is more interesting, it also almost certainly has an answer. "Why" doesn't always have an answer.

To me, reconciling this apparent duality is akin to reconciling quantum mechanics and relativity. We know they both are correct but it also defies logic that they are both correct unless, of course, there is some fundamental property or concept that we haven't yet fully grasped. I have no doubt that there is a scientific explanation. Whether that is M-theory or something completely different, it is out there. Likewise, I think there is a scientific explanation for consciousness. But I don't think the difficulty in finding it is just because we haven't put the pieces together correctly yet. I think it is because we are completely missing the pieces needed to understand it.

Apologies if I am not expressing myself well.

Skeptic Bob said:

Philosophy is a hobby of mine. I don't pretend to be good at it, but I really enjoy it. Lately the hard problem of consciousness has been occupying much of my spare time.

...
And an equally difficult question to answer is how? How do the purely physical processes of your brain result in what feels to be a non-physical consciousness? It is easy to imagine how the firing of neurons causes muscles to move and organs to do their work and to cause reaction to stimuli. We may not understand all the pathways but it is easy to theorize what they might be and how they might act. I can even imagine biologically how the people I interact with every day could do everything they do without them being conscious. Philosophical zombies is the term, I think. But it is hard to even theorize a mechanism for how the subjective experience of consciousness could emerge from that physical interaction of neurons.

Lots of scientists avoid the question altogether. Or perhaps they dismiss it by saying that consciousness is just an illusion. But it seems to me that consciousness is the one thing in the universe that CAN'T be an illusion. I could be a brain in a vat being fooled into thinking I am living in this universe, typing on this computer right now. But I can't deny the fact that I am conscious. My sense of self might be an illusion, but consciousness itself can't be.

There does appear to be a two-way interaction between my consciousness and the physical processes of my brain. After all, if I put things like alcohol or weed into my system, it alters the nature of my consciousness. And the mere fact that I am sitting here addressing the hard problem of consciousness means that my physical brain is aware that consciousness exists and is aware what subjective experience feels like, otherwise it wouldn't even occur to my brain to make this thread.

I'll stop there to see if this thread gets any traction.

Click to expand...

Consciousness serves the purpose of directing our attention across a big picture. Our subconsciousness does generally guide our individual decisions. One example, i'm about to go to lunch. On some level, the place i go and the food i eat will be decided primarily by my subconsciousness. I will likely engage in my typical routine of trying to imagine what options are available, which of those options are most satisfying to my appetite/nutritional needs, and then making a decision. Whether my consciousness makes the ultimate decision or not is irrelevant, as my choice to go through the motions is ultimately at the discretion of my consciousness. I can stand in line at the place i always go, ready to order the thing i always get, and then i can choose to change my mind at the last minute, for whatever reason i like. I can sit here at work, thinking about other places to eat for several hours, if i decide that i'm not satisfied with the best available option i've found so far.

Our consciousness plays the role of making almost no decisions and yet it has essentially full responsibility for the decisions we make. The buck stops at our consciousness. We are not responsible for our human instincts and reflexes, we are only responsible for the ways that our consciousness permits us to behave as a result. We are generally simple creatures that are on auto-pilot, a complex set of conditioned reflexes that is rarely willing or able to critically assess itself.

Our survival has always been contingent upon having an ignorant view of ourselves. We aren't built to understand how stupid we are. Consciousness is a tool that gives us the ability to avoid things we find unpleasant so we can focus on survival. It's a blind spot that we control. It is the incompetent leader of our own feeble mind.

Subconsciousness stacks the deck against the consciousness to control our behavior. A good example is partisanship/tribalism. We align the interests of our tribe with our survival subconsciously, and that alignment infects the outputs of our reasoning. People don't neglect to criticize the leader of their tribe because they objectively evaluated the behavior, they do it because they see it as is in their interests, for other reasons, to do so. They aren't aware of this because it does not occur consciously.

Consciousness is essentially the orchestrated coordination between the various elements of the brain. When you take the pictures from your eyes, the sounds from your ears, the feeling from your skin; when it's all put together, it becomes an experience. Consciousness is just the assembling of experience.

I suppose i think we're all philosophical zombies most of the time, there's just those few, inspiring moments where we summon the courage to be something more.

Abbazorkzog said:

I actually wrote a hard sci-fi novel about this that I'm in the process of editing. It takes place in the year 2119 and humanity has journeyed as far as Alpha Centauri, yet the planets have formed their own nation-states, and there is a war between Jupiter and Mars. Transhumanism has given rise to a "second humanity," with humans on Miranda evolving into the Mir, become asexual and opened their third-eye. There's also the lofty Jovians who are basically the "Nordic" species from Ufology, averaging 6'6 to 7' and superior physically and all are traditionally blonde-haired and blue-eyed. Titan and the moons of Saturn are controlled by the Titan Corporation, which wields an army of war machines large enough to threaten Earth (which is basically the U.S. of the future). The Earth Assembly (E.A.) partners with the Jovian monarchy to launch an expedition in the 2100's to find the origin of consciousness (to create true AI competent enough to beat back the Titan Bots). When nobody returns, they find their remains beyond the orbit of Pluto, where they find a hidden planet that turns out to be a black tetrahedron made of an unknown metaphysical, indestructible alloy. When it activates, the squadron known as Templar is transported millions of lightyears away into a superstructure at the center of the Great Attractor, which they then find out is the Great Attractor, but only after they awaken an ancient alliance of various species of Reptilians that essentially evolved from a cerebral contagion (referring to Noam Chomsky's views of human intelligence as a lethal mutation and that the reptilian brain is in fact a DNA virus that corrupted primates, mammalians and aquatics for generations) which are themselves being directed by an even more expansive and nigh-omnipotent supercomputer calling itself the "Tetragrammaton"...

Click to expand...

Very cool. I seem to remember a sci-fi novel series that involved several warring alien species. And one of those species, even though they were highly intelligent and possessed advanced technology and space travel, lacked consciousness. Obviously they came to be through evolution but it makes me think of artificial intelligence. Is it theoretically possible that we could devople artificial intelligence equal or superior to us in every way except for having consciousness? And if so, what would be the demonstrable difference between that AI and AI that was exactly the same except it did have consciousness?

Skeptic Bob said:

Basically the hard problem of consciousness is why is there experience? Why is there a subjective point of view?

If you really think about it, there is no obvious reason why you need consciousness to go about your life as a human.

Click to expand...

I disagree. I suspect that experiences are probably an easy way to distribute the various (critical) information globally to the various parts of the brain.

And an equally difficult question to answer is how?

Click to expand...

That's pretty much the only question.

However, just because it's unanswered, it does not follow that it can never be answered. It took hundreds of years to even begin to answer "What is gravity?" It will probably take almost as long to determine how to reconcile our current theories of gravity and quantum mechanics.

I don't think anyone is avoiding the issue. The problem is that it's extremely difficult to study. We can't run around carving up people's brains, or even putting deep probes into willing subjects, in order to determine how the brain works; our current tools (like fMRI) are still very broad.

There does appear to be a two-way interaction between my consciousness and the physical processes of my brain. After all, if I put things like alcohol or weed into my system, it alters the nature of my consciousness. And the mere fact that I am sitting here addressing the hard problem of consciousness means that my physical brain is aware that consciousness exists and is aware what subjective experience feels like, otherwise it wouldn't even occur to my brain to make this thread.

Click to expand...

Sure, but the subjective experience of consciousness as non-physical does not prove that consciousness itself is not actually non-physical. You don't learn about neurological structures based on introspection.

And as I've pointed out in another thread recently: There really is no way for the non-physical and physical to interact. It's a violation of the laws of physics, in particular conservation laws. It can't work. Meaning that there has to be a physical process, just one we don't yet understand.

Skeptic Bob said:

Philosophy is a hobby of mine. I don't pretend to be good at it, but I really enjoy it. Lately the hard problem of consciousness has been occupying much of my spare time.

Basically the hard problem of consciousness is why is there experience? Why is there a subjective point of view?

If you really think about it, there is no obvious reason why you need consciousness to go about your life as a human. Practically everything you do happens on a level you are not conscious of. When someone speaks to you your brain interprets what they say without any conscious effort. Your brain is constantly processing information from your senses that you are not consciously aware of. Experimental data even seems to reveal that the decisions we make are made subconsciously moments before the conscious self becomes aware of the decision.

So why even have that last step of being consciously aware of what your brain is doing? Why aren't we just really complicated organic machines. Why are "the lights on"?

And an equally difficult question to answer is how? How do the purely physical processes of your brain result in what feels to be a non-physical consciousness? It is easy to imagine how the firing of neurons causes muscles to move and organs to do their work and to cause reaction to stimuli. We may not understand all the pathways but it is easy to theorize what they might be and how they might act. I can even imagine biologically how the people I interact with every day could do everything they do without them being conscious. Philosophical zombies is the term, I think. But it is hard to even theorize a mechanism for how the subjective experience of consciousness could emerge from that physical interaction of neurons.

Lots of scientists avoid the question altogether. Or perhaps they dismiss it by saying that consciousness is just an illusion. But it seems to me that consciousness is the one thing in the universe that CAN'T be an illusion. I could be a brain in a vat being fooled into thinking I am living in this universe, typing on this computer right now. But I can't deny the fact that I am conscious. My sense of self might be an illusion, but consciousness itself can't be.

There does appear to be a two-way interaction between my consciousness and the physical processes of my brain. After all, if I put things like alcohol or weed into my system, it alters the nature of my consciousness. And the mere fact that I am sitting here addressing the hard problem of consciousness means that my physical brain is aware that consciousness exists and is aware what subjective experience feels like, otherwise it wouldn't even occur to my brain to make this thread.

I'll stop there to see if this thread gets any traction.

Click to expand...

All things that are alive have consciousness, what you're talking about is self awareness.

Visbek said:

I disagree. I suspect that experiences are probably an easy way to distribute the various (critical) information globally to the various parts of the brain.



That's pretty much the only question.

However, just because it's unanswered, it does not follow that it can never be answered. It took hundreds of years to even begin to answer "What is gravity?" It will probably take almost as long to determine how to reconcile our current theories of gravity and quantum mechanics.

I don't think anyone is avoiding the issue. The problem is that it's extremely difficult to study. We can't run around carving up people's brains, or even putting deep probes into willing subjects, in order to determine how the brain works; our current tools (like fMRI) are still very broad.



Sure, but the subjective experience of consciousness as non-physical does not prove that consciousness itself is not actually non-physical. You don't learn about neurological structures based on introspection.

And as I've pointed out in another thread recently: There really is no way for the non-physical and physical to interact. It's a violation of the laws of physics, in particular conservation laws. It can't work. Meaning that there has to be a physical process, just one we don't yet understand.

Click to expand...

Probably the most compelling function of the construction of consciousness is the ability to coordinate between vastly different types of information.

In computer programming, the algorithms are almost trivial, the real challenge is in managing data structures. What i mean by that is that once the relationships between different data structures is understood, the algorithm becomes obvious. For example, if we are to try to compute whether 1.4 > 2. A simple machine may interpret "1.4" as a float, and "2" as an integer, resulting in an inability to evaluate the expression. But if we have a context that can distinguish what makes a float different than an integer, we can go from one to the other, for example, by simplifying "1.4" to "1" or by complicating "2" to "2.0". In either case, it becomes trivially easy to evaluate that 1.4 is, indeed, less than 2.

I have a feeling that once we understand how data is truly stored in the brain, the answers to these questions will become obvious.

As for your response about physical processes, physics has basically determined that we cannot have a theory that satisfies both completeness and locality, meaning that we may never be able to understand all the physical processes that we observe.

jet57 said:

All things that are alive have consciousness, what you're talking about is self awareness.

Click to expand...

There is definitely a distinction between the two, though in some cases the line is fuzzy.

So you believe all living things have consciousness. What about:

An ant?
A fungus?
A bacteria?

Skeptic Bob said:

There is definitely a distinction between the two, though in some cases the line is fuzzy.

So you believe all living things have consciousness. What about:

An ant?
A fungus?
A bacteria?

Click to expand...

"Energy" is consciousness". Plant reactions to stimuli have had measured effects.

Self awareness however is much more sophisticated.

The question that you want to ask is; is the earth self aware?

jet57 said:

"Energy" is consciousness". Plant reactions to stimuli have had measured effects.

Self awareness however is much more sophisticated.

The question that you want to ask is; is the earth self aware?

Click to expand...

I am less interested in self awareness because it is further up the complexity scale. Give a chimp a mirror and the chimp will use the mirror to examine himself. Apes, dolphins, orcas, magpies and one elephant have passed this "mirror test". It isn't a perfect test for self awareness but it is easy to see how there would be a correlation. But with consciousness I am taking a reductionist approach to determine at what level it first arises.

Consciousness is merely subjective experience. If something is conscious that means there is "qualia". It means there is something that it is like to be that thing that is phenomenologically different than being non-existent. If there is, say, a phenomenological difference between the most basic elementary particle and non-existence, then that difference, it could be argued, is the building block of consciousness.

This is akin to panpsychism and sounds a bit like what you are describing. There are some philosophers, physicists, and neuroscientists who consider it a possible contender.

Skeptic Bob said:

I am less interested in self awareness because it is further up the complexity scale. Give a chimp a mirror and the chimp will use the mirror to examine himself. Apes, dolphins, orcas, magpies and one elephant have passed this "mirror test". It isn't a perfect test for self awareness but it is easy to see how there would be a correlation. But with consciousness I am taking a reductionist approach to determine at what level it first arises.

Consciousness is merely subjective experience. If something is conscious that means there is "qualia". It means there is something that it is like to be that thing that is phenomenologically different than being non-existent. If there is, say, a phenomenological difference between the most basic elementary particle and non-existence, then that difference, it could be argued, is the building block of consciousness.

This is akin to panpsychism and sounds a bit like what you are describing. There are some philosophers, physicists, and neuroscientists who consider it a possible contender.

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David Chalmers addresses it around the 9:18 mark.

Skeptic Bob said:

I am less interested in self awareness because it is further up the complexity scale. Give a chimp a mirror and the chimp will use the mirror to examine himself. Apes, dolphins, orcas, magpies and one elephant have passed this "mirror test". It isn't a perfect test for self awareness but it is easy to see how there would be a correlation. But with consciousness I am taking a reductionist approach to determine at what level it first arises.

Consciousness is merely subjective experience. If something is conscious that means there is "qualia". It means there is something that it is like to be that thing that is phenomenologically different than being non-existent. If there is, say, a phenomenological difference between the most basic elementary particle and non-existence, then that difference, it could be argued, is the building block of consciousness.

This is akin to panpsychism and sounds a bit like what you are describing. There are some philosophers, physicists, and neuroscientists who consider it a possible contender.

Click to expand...

I consider self awareness to be one measure of the complexity of the intelligence, but it's hard to tell what roles it plays.

Have you heard of Douglas Hofstadter? He wrote Gödel, Escher, Bach and I Am A Strange Loop.

In the end, we are self-perceiving, self-inventing, locked-in mirages that are little miracles of self-reference.

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Emphasis here for me is on the "self-inventing" aspect. Actually, i think we can form a complete explanation for human behavior on the basis of feedback control systems that can operate on an unlimited range of inputs and outputs because they are self-inventing. We can decide that we want to climb a mountain, we simulate in our mind what we would need to do to accomplish this, we plan based on the simulation, we attempt, and then, if we fail, we re-asses how and why we failed to improve the next try. Once we decide on a goal (outputs), even if it seems impossible like flying to the moon once did, we can keep changing what we do (inputs), and observing the results of those efforts to generate error signals to improve the next attempt (feedback from output, observation, to input, next attempt).

We can create these feedback control loops arbitrarily and in reference to virtually anything, even ourselves. This kind of connects with what i think Hotsteader is talking about; when he discusses sets that contain themselves, or other elements of self-reference, it's a measure of the range of possible outputs that can be observed to feedback into our behavior.

Part of the reason that our artificial intelligence has limitations is based on Searle's infamous Chinese Room thought experiment. We can construct a sufficiently complex set of rules so that it is indistinguishable from consciousness to an outside observer, but that's not necessarily consciousness. Consciousness requires the ability to make a decision on what goal, self-invention. It is the flashlight in the darkness of all available inputs. It filters and fuses the sensory and memory data to form experiences. It points, directs, and orchestrates; it arbitrates the various parts of the whole.

Absentglare said:

I consider self awareness to be one measure of the complexity of the intelligence, but it's hard to tell what roles it plays.

Have you heard of Douglas Hofstadter? He wrote Gödel, Escher, Bach and I Am A Strange Loop.



Emphasis here for me is on the "self-inventing" aspect. Actually, i think we can form a complete explanation for human behavior on the basis of feedback control systems that can operate on an unlimited range of inputs and outputs because they are self-inventing. We can decide that we want to climb a mountain, we simulate in our mind what we would need to do to accomplish this, we plan based on the simulation, we attempt, and then, if we fail, we re-asses how and why we failed to improve the next try. Once we decide on a goal (outputs), even if it seems impossible like flying to the moon once did, we can keep changing what we do (inputs), and observing the results of those efforts to generate error signals to improve the next attempt (feedback from output, observation, to input, next attempt).

We can create these feedback control loops arbitrarily and in reference to virtually anything, even ourselves. This kind of connects with what i think Hotsteader is talking about; when he discusses sets that contain themselves, or other elements of self-reference, it's a measure of the range of possible outputs that can be observed to feedback into our behavior.

Part of the reason that our artificial intelligence has limitations is based on Searle's infamous Chinese Room thought experiment. We can construct a sufficiently complex set of rules so that it is indistinguishable from consciousness to an outside observer, but that's not necessarily consciousness. Consciousness requires the ability to make a decision on what goal, self-invention. It is the flashlight in the darkness of all available inputs. It filters and fuses the sensory and memory data to form experiences. It points, directs, and orchestrates; it arbitrates the various parts of the whole.

Click to expand...

Very well articulated. I'll check Hofstadter out.

Skeptic Bob said:

Philosophy is a hobby of mine. I don't pretend to be good at it, but I really enjoy it. Lately the hard problem of consciousness has been occupying much of my spare time.

Basically the hard problem of consciousness is why is there experience? Why is there a subjective point of view?

If you really think about it, there is no obvious reason why you need consciousness to go about your life as a human. Practically everything you do happens on a level you are not conscious of. When someone speaks to you your brain interprets what they say without any conscious effort. Your brain is constantly processing information from your senses that you are not consciously aware of. Experimental data even seems to reveal that the decisions we make are made subconsciously moments before the conscious self becomes aware of the decision.

So why even have that last step of being consciously aware of what your brain is doing? Why aren't we just really complicated organic machines. Why are "the lights on"?

And an equally difficult question to answer is how? How do the purely physical processes of your brain result in what feels to be a non-physical consciousness? It is easy to imagine how the firing of neurons causes muscles to move and organs to do their work and to cause reaction to stimuli. We may not understand all the pathways but it is easy to theorize what they might be and how they might act. I can even imagine biologically how the people I interact with every day could do everything they do without them being conscious. Philosophical zombies is the term, I think. But it is hard to even theorize a mechanism for how the subjective experience of consciousness could emerge from that physical interaction of neurons.

Lots of scientists avoid the question altogether. Or perhaps they dismiss it by saying that consciousness is just an illusion. But it seems to me that consciousness is the one thing in the universe that CAN'T be an illusion. I could be a brain in a vat being fooled into thinking I am living in this universe, typing on this computer right now. But I can't deny the fact that I am conscious. My sense of self might be an illusion, but consciousness itself can't be.

There does appear to be a two-way interaction between my consciousness and the physical processes of my brain. After all, if I put things like alcohol or weed into my system, it alters the nature of my consciousness. And the mere fact that I am sitting here addressing the hard problem of consciousness means that my physical brain is aware that consciousness exists and is aware what subjective experience feels like, otherwise it wouldn't even occur to my brain to make this thread.

I'll stop there to see if this thread gets any traction.

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I have a rather interesting-sounding book a good friend gave me, but I haven't gotten into it yet. It reads like proper academic philosophy in some parts, which means I'll have to set aside some serious quiet and alone time. It's the opposite of beach reading.


"The Conscious Mind (In search of a fundamental theory)" David J. Chalmers.

Mr Person said:

I have a rather interesting-sounding book a good friend gave me, but I haven't gotten into it yet. It reads like proper academic philosophy in some parts, which means I'll have to set aside some serious quiet and alone time. It's the opposite of beach reading.


"The Conscious Mind (In search of a fundamental theory)" David J. Chalmers.

Click to expand...

I have been watching a lot of David Chalmers videos on youtube lately. I'll have to check out his book.

Mr Person said:

I have a rather interesting-sounding book a good friend gave me, but I haven't gotten into it yet. It reads like proper academic philosophy in some parts, which means I'll have to set aside some serious quiet and alone time. It's the opposite of beach reading.

"The Conscious Mind (In search of a fundamental theory)" David J. Chalmers.

Click to expand...

Meh

His ideas are/were influential, and it is a good effort to accept that traditional dualism violates physics, while trying to assert some other route to non-physical consciousness. He also seems more open-minded than many involved in the debate over the ontological status of consciousness. However, the book is riddled with problems, and exploring the challenges facing his ideas requires reading lots of other literature in the field.