
Consciousness Isn’t Self-Centered - dnetesn
http://nautil.us/issue/82/panpsychism/consciousness-isnt-self_centered
======
seemslegit
Consciousness is made of primordial cheese, formed by an interaction of a
lactic field permeating the universe with spontaneously occuring quantum
fermeons - if Nautilus is interested in this idea I'll be happy to elaborate
on it in long form, complete with references to David Chalmers as well as
James McIntyre.

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yes_man
If anyone is interested in a framework that tries to put rigor into this
otherwise very open-ended problem of defining consciousness, the integrated
information theory
([https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_information_theor...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_information_theory))
is one approach. Problem with a "traditional" philosophical approach to
consciousness is that it's hard to prove and equally hard to disprove. And
although integrated information theory starts with the assumption that
"consciousness exists", and builds on top of that assumption, at least it's a
step in a direction where the problem of consciousness is turned into a
measurable property. After all, even the most rigorous of natural sciences
rest on some axioms. And I am not claiming that integrated information theory
is in any way correct (although it may be). But theorizing about consciousness
without a tangible logical framework always feels like it's not going
anywhere, so I welcome the pursuit for scientific advancement in said theory

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unkulunkulu
This ties quite well with what Alan Watts says about the universal
consciousness, its manifestations and the role of ego in all of this.
Sometimes its quite believable that two consciousnesses coming in close
contact for a moment give rise to something quite new and bigger than the
parts.

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grabbalacious
My argument against panpsychism (the principled form of animism, which is
ancient) is that to perceive something you have to have a representation of it
in memory. Ergo if you don't have a memory system you can't be conscious of
anything. Rocks don't have RAM.

~~~
andrewflnr
You could quite reasonably consider an excited electron to be a 1-bit memory
of experiencing a photon recently. My understanding of panpsychism is that it
doesn't require everything to have an equally sophisticated
consciousness/experience as ours, just some. And sure, an excited electron
decays, but so do your memory and bits in RAM.

~~~
grabbalacious
Well I suspect a memory system, together with stable input/output hardware,
are necessary but not sufficient. To be a conscious agent, said agent's memory
must include a representation of itself. Otherwise it can't truthfully say, "I
see a pebble."

Edit: it can't truthfully _think_ , "I see a pebble."

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LargoLasskhyfv
Consciousness is just an emergent phenomenon caused by checksum errors in the
filesystem/object store/younameit of the quantum foam storage of the akashic
records.

There...

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Leary
Found some interesting reading:

[https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/mind-indian-
buddhism/](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/mind-indian-buddhism/)

Perhaps someone well versed in this can tell us how this article's theory
relates to the non-self that Buddhists have been talking about for 2,000
years.

~~~
carapace
The theory is pretty much standard Buddhism. Hinduism too for that matter (no
pun intended.) "Atman is Paramatman"

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lisper
> Is it possible that alongside the conscious experience of “me,” there is a
> much dimmer experience of each individual neuron?

No.

~~~
babygoat
Show your work.

~~~
lisper
If everything that exists is conscious, then consciousness ceases to be a
useful concept and becomes nothing more than a synonym for existence. The
concept of consciousness is only useful to distinguish things that are
conscious from things that are not. Humans and apes are conscious. Rocks and
individual neurons are not. One can have a legitimate debate about the status
of computers, great apes, dogs, rats, perhaps even fruit flies, but not rocks,
transistors, or individual neurons.

~~~
andrewflnr
You're assuming consciousness is a single bit, when that's not even true in
humans. How "conscious" are you when slowly waking up? It varies by
circumstance, too, e.g. I'd say I'm certainly less explicitly self-aware when
I'm walking a familiar route and not thinking about much than when pondering
my place in the universe. It's easy to imagine a mind that only had the first
kind of experience. We don't even need to consider easy cases of variable
consciousness like sleep (maybe with lucid dreams), sedation, coma, etc.

Consciousness is a matter of degree, and there's no hard evidence about how
low the scale goes.

~~~
lisper
> You're assuming consciousness is a single bit

No, I'm not. Consciousness is a continuum, not a dichotomy. There are
nonetheless systems whose degree of consciousness is indistinguishable from
zero.

> there's no hard evidence about how low the scale goes.

Of course there is. It goes down to zero. Rocks are not conscious. Dead people
are not conscious. Even humans under general anesthesia are not conscious.

~~~
procgen
Is anyone but you conscious? If so, how can you be certain?

~~~
lisper
> Is anyone but you conscious?

Yes.

> If so, how can you be certain?

I can't be absolutely certain of that nor of anything else. The philosophical-
zombie hypothesis cannot be ruled out by evidence. But I observe others
producing complex I/O behavior that is qualitatively similar to that which _I_
produce and that I attribute to my own consciousness. I also see evidence that
my consciousness supervenes on the operation of my brain, and I observe that
other people have brains. The most parsimonious explanation for all that is
that other humans are also conscious.

~~~
procgen
Do you have any sense of what the simplest conscious system looks like? Can we
construct one from legos in an aircraft hangar?

~~~
lisper
> Do you have any sense of what the simplest conscious system looks like?

Nope.

> Can we construct one from legos in an aircraft hangar?

Almost certainly not. We can't even construct one on a silicon chip (yet).

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bionhoward
"But, as Deepak Chopra taught us, quantum physics means anything can happen at
any time for no reason."

\- Professor Hubert Farnsworth

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dimovich
When it comes to consciousness, I really like the ideas of Douglas Hofstadter
[0]. This article feels like a step backwards from that.

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_a_Strange_Loop](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_a_Strange_Loop)

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robbrown451
"Rather than consciousness arising when non-conscious matter behaves a
particular way, is it possible that consciousness is an intrinsic property of
matter—that it was there all along?"

Umm, really?

Sounds nice and touchy-feely new agey, but, I'm saying no.

More likely you just haven't tried to define consciousness clearly and non-
circularly, and when you do, it just kind of goes away as a concept. If you
can tell me, in any sort of scientific terms, why a self driving car isn't
conscious but a human is, maybe we can get somewhere.

~~~
erikpukinskis
How is this circular? Physics has the notion of an observer, which is inherent
to all matter. This is just saying observer effects happen everywhere all the
time and your skull is just concentrating it.

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Erlich_Bachman
"Observer" notion from physics (does not matter if we are talking about
neutonian or QM or whatever) have nothing to do with consciousness. "Observer"
in physics is just a description of a certain point of view within the system.
The connection of that to consciousness is usually done by popular quasi-
philosophy books loosely based on physics and using some of the same terms,
they do not come from the physics itself.

~~~
erikpukinskis
Saying there is no connection is an unfalsifiable claim, so you’ve departed
the realm of science with that one.

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Erlich_Bachman
What I mean is, physics makes no claims about any such connection. I could
have been more clear. People are free to explore any connection or lack
thereof, but there isn't any claims to that coming from mainstream physics.

~~~
erikpukinskis
Have you done a literature review? Have you searched for quantum effects and
cognition in the literature?

~~~
Erlich_Bachman
Well yeah, hence my statement. The word "observer" when used in physics
usually refers to the instrumental measurement process, not to perception by a
consciousness/human. There are of course outliers, scientists that will make
the draw, but they are in a miniscule minority. There are also thought
experiments that are common that will talk about this, but they almost always
used in order to actually demonstrate the non-fitness of this line of
reasoning for physical sciences.

The people who make these claims are usually woo-woo writers who make money by
writing popular culture books related to a subset of quantum mechanics
phenomena and to a limited understanding thereof.

This shouldn't be too hard to see either when you understand that
consciousness is not well-defined yet by mainstream science, and so why would
it study it using the well-defined methods like physics? That if anything
would lead to unfalsifiable hypotheses, and mainstream physics luckily doesn't
indulge in that so often.

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carapace
I was thinking just this morning that I should write a book: Metaphysics for
Computer Nerds & Computers for Metaphysicians. I am lonely in the intersection
between mysticism and hard mathematical science.

> And the fact that the hard problem has persisted for so many decades,
> despite the advances in neuroscience, has caused some scientists to wonder
> if we’ve been thinking about the problem backward. Rather than consciousness
> arising when non-conscious matter behaves a particular way, is it possible
> that consciousness is an intrinsic property of matter—that it was there all
> along?

Why do folks present this idea like it's new and radical? It's literally
thousands of years old.

Aldous Huxley wrote "The Perennial Philosophy" in 1945.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Perennial_Philosophy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Perennial_Philosophy)

> However, it seems to me that the obstacle one faces here isn’t a combination
> problem but the confusion of consciousness with the concept of a self. ...
> And this concept of the self is an illusion.

Recapitulate the basic finding of Buddhism, This has been known for thousands
of years.

> it may be more accurate to instead talk about the content and quality of
> conscious experience at any given location in spacetime, determined by the
> matter present there.

Now we're gwtting somewhere...

> would two brains wired together produce a new, integrated mind?

In a word, yes. You don't even need to connect them with a _corpus callosum_ ,
the bandwidth and latency of our built-in hardware is sufficient:

"Psychedelic experiences associated with a novel hypnotic procedure, mutual
hypnosis."
[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/6080106](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/6080106)

\- - - -

Gurdjieff presents a world system wherein (I am paraphrasing and condensing
wildly and inaccurately here) the human isn't born with a soul but must
construct one during it's mortal lifetime or "die like a dog" leaving nothing
behind.

There are (in this world model) three kinds of matter: terrestrial matter (of
the Earth), stellar matter (of the Sun and solar system) and interstellar
matter (which is stable outside the Sun's heliopause.)

The process of constructing a soul proceeds in two stages. First one "coats"
the physical body through and through with a stellar matter to make the
"second being-body", and then again with interstellar matter to make the
"third being-body" or _soul_. This third body is stable beyond the solar
system and, importantly, beyond the death of the original physical body. The
second being-body is not stable on it's own without the first or third bodies.

I bring this up because it's a fascinating (IMO) third concept besides "humans
do not have souls" and "humans do have souls": "humans are born w/o souls and
must make them themselves before death".

It also makes a kind of sense that, in order for your human consciousness to
survive the death of the body, the material matrix within which and through
which your human experience carries on, you need another nearly-identical body
_made out of more durable stuff._

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agumonkey
maybe it's a wave between avatarial representations of other before us

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stevebmark
Nautilus articles seem to frontpage on average once a weekend. The weird thing
is the articles have _very_ low engagement on HN in terms of comments. Given
the weekly cadence and low engagement on every article this may mean Nautilus
is running an internal upvote campaign.

~~~
carapace
31 pts 26 comments now.

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nikivi
It's things like these:

[https://twitter.com/rmartinledo/status/1233388613490139136](https://twitter.com/rmartinledo/status/1233388613490139136)

That make you wonder how vast consciousness really is.

And how self centered we are still as species. Eating other animals for
'pleasure'. It's sad.

~~~
Erlich_Bachman
Could you explain why that particular video makes you think about that? I
mean, do you consider the creatures on the picture as having a consciousness?
Those look far from being conscious to me, they are just small creatures with
a couple of functions like moving, finding food and eating...

~~~
nikivi
I would argue humans are like this too, biologically speaking.

