
What If Consciousness Comes First? - devilcius
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/mysteries-consciousness/201907/what-if-consciousness-comes-first?
======
Animats
The real answer is that we don't yet know enough about how the brain works to
work effectively on this problem. We don't know what questions to ask or how
to break down the problem into smaller problems.

We may get there. Read something about how vision works from a century ago,
when nobody had a clue. The first real progress came from "What the Frog's Eye
Tells the Frog's Brain" (1959).[1] That was the beginning of understanding
visual perception, and the very early days of neural network technology. Now
we have lots of systems doing visual perception moderately well. There's been
real progress.

(I went through Stanford CS at the peak of the 1980s expert system boom. Back
then, people there were way too much into asking questions like this. "Does a
rock have intentions?" was an exam question. The "AI winter" followed. AI
finally got unstuck 20 years later when the machine learning people and their
"shut up and calculate" approach started working.)

[1]
[https://hearingbrain.org/docs/letvin_ieee_1959.pdf](https://hearingbrain.org/docs/letvin_ieee_1959.pdf)

~~~
notJim
> "Does a rock have intentions?" was an exam question.

What does a good answer to this question look like in this context? Genuinely
curious what they were looking for.

Imo the real question is whether humans have intentions. It seems like if you
look at it rationally, we're just collections of chemicals reacting with each
other. Set the initial conditions and then the whole thing is deterministic.
It's pretty uncomfortable to think this though, so I think it's best if we
avoid the subject.

~~~
ivanhoe
> Set the initial conditions and then the whole thing is deterministic

If quantum physics theories are correct than there's always some amount of
pure randomness in the game, making it impossible to create perfectly
deterministic and repeatable system of any significant complexity.

~~~
state_less
Where does the randomness come from? If we could rewind the universe back to
the same starting conditions, would it be any different the second time
through and if so, where did that difference come from?

~~~
p1mrx
If you suppose an infinite multiverse where every possible thing happens in
parallel, a typical observer will find themself in a universe with events that
seem random. There are a lot more random-looking numbers than orderly-looking
numbers.

------
eblanshey
The idea that consciousness comes first has been known as in eastern
philosophy as non-dualism (advaita vedanta) -- everything is consciousness.
The basic idea is that it is impossible to experience anything outside of our
consciousness--thus any assumption there is something outside of consciousness
is just that -- an assumption or belief. We can theorize, we can argue, but it
will always remain a belief, because it's not possible to experience anything
outside of consciousness.

I'd like to share Rupert Spira, a modern non-dualist teacher that holds this
view-point. Here is one video in which he explains the consciousness-first
approach to someone, a scientist, who holds to the materialist approach:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qgcfa0LFKXc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qgcfa0LFKXc)

Perhaps someone will find it interesting and peruse some of his other videos,
which I find very enlightening.

~~~
lioeters
I think the controversy of consciousness arises from (and is deeply tied to)
the history of Western philosophy and science: the "death of God",
matter/spirit and mind/body duality. Something that's not widely acknowledged
is how Indian philosophy (Hindu, Buddhist) had significant influence in the
course of that history.

A major assumption of the currently dominant worldview is that there's no God,
spirit, and even "mind" is questionable. Everything must be explainable as
physics, and layers above like mechanics, chemistry, biology. Psychology as a
field - in the "West", which is basically a global culture now - is based on
that assumption.

The word "consciousness" is so ill-defined and the concept so misunderstood,
mainly because it's mixed up with ideas of free will, mind, spirit - the
animating principle. It's just the most modern term for categorizing and
trying to understand a class of phenomena.

Seeing how "consciousness studies" is widely considered a pseudo-science, I
suspect that it's actually related to some critical "flaw" in the fundamentals
of the modern worldview, the assumption of a completely physical universe -
"physical" meaning consistent with the science of physics.

What's fascinating for me is how quantum mechanics and its philosophical
speculations about the role of the observer seems to be causing a paradigm
shift, which is taking decades (almost a century) to sink in. We seem to be
redefining consciousness as a fundamental property of physics, with some even
theorizing that consciousness plays a role in bringing the universe into
existence.

As a fan of both Indian philosophy and Western science, I'm greatly enjoying
the battle of the ideas (often heated arguments and accusations of "woowoo"
pseudo-scientific thinking), the struggle to understand the nature of
consciousness deeply and rigorously, and the evolution of science and our
worldviews.

~~~
eblanshey
> Everything must be explainable as physics, and layers above like mechanics,
> chemistry, biology. Psychology as a field - in the "West", which is
> basically a global culture now - is based on that assumption.

That's right. It's pretty amazing how much is based off of that assumption
which has no realistic basis. I guess it's a "convenient" assumption.

But if we start to think that hey, maybe consciousness is the root of it all,
not matter, then we can see why science doesn't understand consciousness at
all: it's like trying to find the screen while studying the pictures on it.
You can study all the biology, physics, and matter on the screen, but you
won't find the screen in the details. In this analogy, consciousness is the
"screen" in which all appears. I think mainstream science will shift MASSIVELY
once they start looking into as a legitimate possibility.

~~~
MrScruff
Given that we and everything around us consists of particles obeying the laws
of physics, I don’t think it’s odd that the burden of proof should lie with
those suggesting the existence of something else.

Remember, we are to the best of our knowledge beings that have evolved from
simple cellular organisms obeying the laws of physics. The idea that through
that process of evolution we have somehow broken out of the sandbox is
extraordinary enough that it would need pretty compelling evidence, no matter
how attractive the idea might be.

~~~
eblanshey
> Given that we and everything around us consists of particles obeying the
> laws of physics, I don’t think it’s odd that the burden of proof should lie
> with those suggesting the existence of something else.

If anything, the burden of proof does lie on those who say the particles are
"out there" and give rise to consciousness, because experience says otherwise.
Everything you and the scientists may study happens within their own
consciousness. It is not possible otherwise. We can only know the truth if we
experience it, and anything else is a belief system until proven otherwise.
Thus it is with those that claim there is an "out there" outside of
consciousness that lies the burden of proof.

No one is denying the physical world exists and all that goes with it,
including the evolution of physical matter. The question is what comes first:
the consciousness or the physical?

------
barberousse
I thought it was fascinating as I read the thesis statement that over two
hundred years later we still haven't left Immanuel Kant's orbit. The author
ended the article citing Kant's proposition that space and time belong to the
mind rather than as properties of external reality however Kant directly
answers her question, paraphrasing, "What is it that lends perception the
power of perceiving", to which Kant answers with a technical term, original
apperception, which more concretely means that the _structure_ of
consciousness, no matter its belonging to subjectivity (so-called empirical
apperception, your spontaneous sense of selfhood), is itself objective (those
terms are actually one in Kant, universal === necessary). There are readings
of Kant to go further and suggest that math, by extension, must be the
descriptor of anything that can exist therefore.

Interesting enough, the grandfather of the modern Left, Michel Foucault, spent
a considerable amount of his career trying to dislodge Kant's claim before
coming upon the realization that power informs our perceptions.

~~~
katttrrr
What a thoughtful response. I'd love to know which readings you'd suggest
reading and in what order.

~~~
claudiawerner
Not the user you replied to, but there's no harm (and in my judgement great
benefit) from diving right into Kant, or more generally, German idealism - so
Kant, Fichte, Schelling and Hegel. Marx is also worth visiting for his
"Hegelian" materialism (in this case opposed to idealism). That'll provide the
basics to know what Foucault was talking about.

 _The Cambridge Companion to German Idealism_ (I forget which year) is also
highly recommended though I haven't looked into that myself.

~~~
jasperry
Also, to plug my own favorite dead German guy, Schopenhauer spends a lot of
time in his writings explaining (his interpretation of) Kant's ideas, and his
prose is much easier to understand than Kant's, even in translation. You won't
get any love for Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel from him though.

~~~
claudiawerner
>You won't get any love for Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel from him though.

You most certainly won't :)

------
Grimm1
This article begs the question of our conciousness not being a physical
process which is cool I guess If your peddling thoughts from a dualist from
over a century ago. I still have no reason however, not to believe our
conciousness doesn't arise from the physical configuration and other processes
therein related. To paraphrase "Science cant talk about this purely in physic
terms." No, Science simply hasn't FOUND the way to talk about it in physical
terms which I personally believe in time we will. To be absolutely fair, as
you may have noticed I'm in the camp of people who think Kant is largely
garbage so I'm have a natural bias against works using his thought on the
matter.

~~~
TimTheTinker
Your assumption that consciousness is _only_ physical is merely that - another
assumption. It proves nothing, and claiming otherwise begs the question.

The problem is that all scientific results around the consciousness question
derive from what people report about their personal experience. There's no
other known way to answer any questions about consciousness, and science
hasn't discovered any way to answer questions about the immaterial.

Hence, from a scientific perspective, it's not a question for which an answer
can be deduced from observation -- so questions about it are left to
philosophical inquiry (reasoning inductively from first principles, instead of
deductively from observation) or religion-based worldviews (which can be
coherently accepted/rejected based on their correspondence to reality and
internal consistency).

~~~
greiskul
Science is better then this. We don't need to directly observe something, it's
OK to be able to just indirectly observe.

So, let's assume that consciousness is only physical. What would be the
implications of that? It would imply that other physical objects can interact
with it. We see plenty of evidence of that, with victims of brain damage, or
when using drugs.

Now, to assume that consciousness is not physical, not only you need a
mechanism for it to interact with our physical world (since it can order our
bodies to do stuff) but also for the physical world to act on it.

Hence, from a scientific perspective, it seems pretty clear that consciousness
is physical.

~~~
SubiculumCode
Imagine, if you will that the brain is an antenna, and consciousness is a
soulful radio wave. If you destroy/make inert the brain, consciousness is
lost, what have you shown? You may be tempted to claim that you demonstrated
the fact consciousness arises from the brain, but this isn't the case here:
The consciousness radio-wave still exists, but it is not being received.

The problem is a hard problem which may or may not be ill defined.

~~~
lostmsu
That argument does not pass neither the Occams Razor, nor Popper criteria.

~~~
SubiculumCode
Popper concerns itself with test-ability, not truth. Something can be both
untestable and true.

Occams razor says more about human psychology and beliefs than it does about
reality.

In any case I was not arguing that this scenario represents the true state of
the universe, but am arguing against grand parent's argument that we can
conclude consciousness is physical without making certain assumptions about
the nature and design of the universe, even if empirically it is our best
guess.

~~~
lostmsu
I am not sure I'd care about the definition of "true", that does not fulfill
the Popper criteria. That is the whole point of it.

Occams Razor is a tool people use to pick the best theory (in terms of size)
among theories otherwise describing the same universe. These theories are
otherwise identical.

The same applies to your last point: we simply pick the best theory at hand,
and that argument does exactly that.

------
post_below
I understand the point the author wants to make, but I think they fail to make
it.

As an example, the idea that "there could be a mind that eats food but doesn't
taste it" is silly. We were always going to evolve a way to "scan" food for
it's properties. It just makes evolutionary sense. The more information the
better. Not to mention the reward aspect (there is some reward for doing
everything that contributes to survivial). Of course food tastes good.

Another example the author uses "red looks red" is equally unconsidered. It's
a mental representation of light. There are evolutionary reasons for being
able to distinguish colors, and they have to be represented mentally somehow.
Why doesn't it look like blue? Who cares? All that matters is that it has a
distinct representation.

Also in the article, the "why do rotten eggs smell bad" example... Because
sulfurous compounds are the result of the metabolic processes of various
bacteria. Because those bacteria are present in rotting things, which can
cause illness, we have evolved to find them repellent.

Why are my experiences different from others? Because that's just how
biological organisms beyond a certain complexity work. No two are alike.

A similarly obvious explanation exists for every example in the article. I see
no compelling case that experience cannot be described through biological
processes or that consciousness didn't arise from complexity.

I'm not saying there aren't interesting mysteries where consciousness is
concerned, just that this article seems to completely fail to explore them.

~~~
MrScruff
I’m not sure of the point you’re making. The point is it’s entirely possible
to conceive of a complex biological agent that can take actions on the basis
of sensory input data without invoking the need for a subjective experience.
That would be the ‘philosophical zombie’ described by David Chalmers.

However we have a subjective experience of what it ‘feels like’ to see red.
Why is that needed?

~~~
gnode
Any agent which has the ability to perceive red must have some mechanism which
corresponds to that percept. The percept of red has to be different to other
percepts so that it is not mistaken for something that is not red. It is
subjective because the agent has no mechanism for objective experience.

I think to conceive of a philosophical zombie, you have to say that
consciousness is something uniquely special in that something possessing all
its describing qualities is not it.

------
msiyer
The building blocks of this universe are "things" vibrating. That is all I
know.

Consciousness is a very tricky problem. I often question what happens when a
man loses his "mind". Is the being now just a machine with stored memory which
responds to stimuli?

What happens when a person loses his memory? What role does consciousness play
in this scenario?

How do we let split personality disorder and consciousness to play together?

Also, I look around and see the geometry of flowers and seeds. Geometry that
emanates from the universe. Everything that looks chaotic at one level becomes
extremely beautiful and organized at another.

Also, I see that everything is terribly interconnected. If we think deeply
enough we can easily see that a stone lying outside and us are all the same as
far as building blocks are concerned. The stone is not an unnecessary object,
but our existence and the stone's existence are inextricable.

The universe, whatever is visible to me, is absolutely too grand and too well
engineered to not have some sort of intelligence working behind it.

I do not know.

~~~
agitator
You could just tie it all back to physics.

Not much intelligent about gravity coalescing matter.

But that had the side effect of releasing atomic energy in the form of stars.
The rubble attracted by these stars, orbited till it coalesced itself into
planets.

Those planets are bombarded by atomic energy by stars. Chemical reactions
happened to break down this energy. Life, aka chemical reactions that are able
to persist, started happening as a side effect.

The more robust and more intelligent reactions were able to persist through
fluctuations in environment. ie. ice ages, meteors, etc.

We are nothing more than a persistent, stubborn reaction. A fungus on a hot
rock. Maybe someday we can send some spores to another hot rock, and continue
our fungal infestation. Provided that we don't consume all the resources here
before that happens and fizzle out. In any case, I'm sure there is a fungus,
perhaps a more evolved one, somewhere else in the universe that will.

~~~
wppick
The brain is connected to the gut via the vagus nerve. It's possible that
humans are just a vehicle for bacteria to more quickly and interact with their
environment in a more substantial way in a similar way that human use cars as
a vehicle. I feel like I am an individual with my own consciousness, but it's
possible it is all one shared consciousness by a super network of bacteria

~~~
Koshkin
> _humans are just a vehicle for bacteria_

The meaning of life, explained (in ten words or less).

------
gnode
It seems to me that the properties of consciousness would naturally follow
from any generally intelligent system. An intelligent agent must be aware of
phenomena in its environment, it must be able to distinguish phenomena
(qualia), its experience is subjective to the extent of the limitations of its
connectivity.

> The problem is that there could conceivably be brains that perform all the
> same sensory and decision-making functions as ours but in which there is no
> conscious experience.

I think before this can be said to be a problem, it should be explained how
such a brain (with human-like intelligence) can exist without mechanisms
corresponding to the properties of consciousness.

~~~
umvi
The problem I have with this is that you can then claim that anything and
everything is conscious.

Create a turing machine out of marbles and levers, and it's suddenly
"conscious" with the right configuration. You really believe that given enough
space, a bunch of marbles running along tracks bouncing off levers can become
aware that it is a giant marble machine?

The atoms in one pocket of the sun's chaotic fusion reaction might randomly
and momentarily behave like an intelligent quantum computer - does that mean
the sun is momentarily conscious from time to time?

~~~
MrLeap
Your comment got me thinking so I'm going to ramble a bit. The sun being
conscious makes sense to me. Not as we are, but then again nothing is as we
are. Cats communicate with each other, cleverly explore and learn about their
environment but they aren't conscience like us.

Growing up, my vocabulary advanced waaay faster than my experience. I learned
what the word "nostalgia" was well before I first felt nostalgic. In fact, I
remember feeling it a few times about summers with friends that had moved
before connecting the feeling with the word. It was a slap on forehead moment.
I concluded that nostalgia was an inbuilt "thing", everyone else probably
experienced it in the same way. It's easy for me to consider nostalgia as just
an inbuilt reaction to a certain kind of signal. (Something periodic that
makes you feel good, then it stops. Recalling the period creates a bittersweet
feeling).

The space between consciousness and inanimate intuitively feels to me like a
gradient. Various levels of brain damage might yield someone unresponsive to
speech but responsive to pain. Then there are people who feel no pain, but
otherwise are completely normal.

Therefore, I'd put on the lower end of the consciousness scale "reacting to
changes" the more changes something reacts to, and the more varied their
reactions, the more conscious it is. We're talking things between the sun and
single celled organisms. Single cells don't seem to do much rumination, but
they get hungry.

Advanced consciousness seems to require heritable lessons and skills. A feral
human that somehow survived alone on an island from birth wouldn't be
conscious like the rest of us are, but I bet it would still feel nostalgia if
its favorite berry went extinct.

I'm comfortable ascribing feelings to things with full knowledge they aren't
feeling it like we are. I bet red giant stars feel fat and old.

------
agitator
Hold up, Is this thread being inundated by a religious group or something?

Where is the rational thought behind this consciousness discussion? If all of
you "critical thinkers" are really responding with "You just don't want to
accept that consciousness can't be explained with science" then I have lost my
last remaining bit of hope in humanity's intelligence.

~~~
jonny_eh
Right, it's the classic "God of the gaps". People invested in some kind of
faith latch onto areas not yet explained by science. This relies on the false
belief that if something isn't explained by science, then there's an
opportunity for faith to provide value (aka faith is needed to provide an
explanation).

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

~~~
prmph
But the many worlds interpretation is also a sort of gap-plugging,
unfalsifiable argument to me. With it, no need to actually explain why the
universe is one way or another: all the possibilities exist in different
worlds.

I think people delude themselves that science, at least as currently
practised, is always objective.

------
meroes
Sure maybe from a philosophical point of argument consciousness trumps all and
physical existence and objective external reality should be viewed through
that lense. But every single particle has a worldline tracing back to the Big
Bang, where there were no conscious beings present yet. Only until the
universe cooled and became less dense did consciousness become possible. So
can consciousness really claim supremacy over external reality. To do so would
require retroactivity or bootstrapping. Unless you accept the idea of a
timeless universe where no point on a worldline (or collection of worldlines)
is privileged, and _now_ is a statistical reality more than anything in that
there are more collections of worldlines with consciousnesses when the
universe is relatively evenly made up of dark energy and regular matter+energy
(highest amount observers compared to much closer or much further from Big
Bang).

The flow of time may be a subjective illusion.

~~~
lorenzsell
Conscious beings not being present does not mean that consciousness is not.
This article basically asserts that your cognition of yourself as "conscious
of the world" (as you imply here) may be inverted. The big bang may actually
be the birth of consciousness, which we, as human beings, are gradually
becoming more conscious of.

~~~
driverdan
There is absolutely no evidence to support that claim, nor is there any
plausible reason to believe it.

~~~
crazygringo
There is absolutely no evidence to support any claims at all regarding
consciousness, in any direction.

We know literally _zero_ about the natural basis for consciousness -- and I
mean _zero_ \-- and so that claim (better known as "panpsychism" if you want
to research it) is pretty much as plausible as any other at this point. And
it's been taken pretty seriously by a great number of scientists and
philosophers over the centuries.

~~~
driverdan
It has no more plausibility than there being a giant pink dragon in my garage.

------
jedharris
This is sad. We have good functional accounts of consciousness (Global
Workspace theory [0], Attention Schema theory [1], recent robotics work on
self-attention [2]). These explain much of the specific phenomenology of
conscious experience. However Rawlette clearly is completely unfamiliar with
this extensive and deeply empirical literature.

"Armchair philosophy" like this still gets published way too much, and is
given way too much respect. Rawlette, typical of this genre, believes that
"conceivability", thought experiments independent of empirical facts, and
verbal theorizing can justify beliefs more strongly than actual research.

For good philosophy in this domain, read people like Andy Clark [3].

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

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attention_schema_theory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attention_schema_theory)

[2] [https://www.quantamagazine.org/hod-lipson-is-building-
self-a...](https://www.quantamagazine.org/hod-lipson-is-building-self-aware-
robots-20190711/)

[3]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_Clark](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_Clark)

~~~
eblanshey
I looked into the article you linked regarding self-attention. I quote:

> Yes, we have a different definition that we use that is very concrete. It’s
> mathematical, you can measure it, you can quantify it, you can compute the
> error to what degree. Philosophers might say, “Well, that’s not how we see
> self-awareness.” Then the discussion usually becomes very vague. You can
> argue that our definition is not really self-awareness. But we have
> something that’s very grounded and easy to quantify, because we have a
> benchmark.

So he's redefining something in a way that merely satisfies his world view.
That is not in any way consciousness. Consciousness inherently has the
"knowing" quality of your experience: you _know_ you are reading this. You can
make the smartest, brightest AI robot, with the best machine learning
algorithms, that functions the same as a human being, but in the end, it
doesn't _know_ it's doing that because it isn't _conscious_ of it.

Hell you don't even need a robot for that. A person that has recently died has
all the components you need for a functional human being. The only thing
missing is that it isn't conscious anymore. You can fix/replace the heart, do
whatever you need physically, but changing the physical building blocks, as
per the materialist view, won't bring the consciousness back.

~~~
lostmsu
Your dead person example is bad. The fact, that you can't reasonably restore a
shattered glass does not give glasses any special properties.

~~~
eblanshey
Not sure about that, the example was more like, you CAN restore the shattered
glass 100%, but there will still be something missing from it even if you do.

~~~
lostmsu
That does not address the point of the argument.

And if you could restore a body why do you think consciousness would not
return? Alcohol example kinda hints that it's exactly how it works.

~~~
eblanshey
Well, we know that heart transplants, for example, can give someone many more
years to live. But if you transplant a good heart to a person who died 10
minutes ago in the same way you would to a living person, the person won't
come back.

~~~
lostmsu
That's exactly how any heart transplants used to work: you stop the heart (now
the patient is dead), cut it off, put the new one back. If the body is cold
enough, 10 minutes might be OK.

The reason it does not work past 10 minutes without cooling is that brain
cells start dying en masse, including ones running vital functions.

------
baron_harkonnen
The most interesting view of consciousness that really changed my thoughts on
it was from Wegner's "The Illusion of Conscious Will". He basically argues
this:

We have an agent-based model to understand the behavior of certain things in
the world. When we see a cat chase a mouse we assume that the cat as an agent
which has a goal which is to catch the mouse. That is we imagine the
intentions of the cat (and the mouse) to better predict what will happen next.
This is just a mental model, but it's different than the causal model we use
to predict where a baseball will land when you throw it.

We apply this model to all sorts of things because it is useful to help
predict behavior. That is we imagine conscious intention as a tool to
understand things in our world.

The catch is that when we observer our own mind at work... we apply this same
model. This is a weird moment where we try to imagine that we have conscious
intentions, but since it is own on selves we are watching this creates the
illusion of conscious will.

Whether or not Wegner really nails it, I become increasingly suspicious that
consciousness is far less special and much more of a trick than we believe it
is. But because that illusion is tied to who we "are" we have a very hard time
letting go (of course this idea goes back to Buddha and earlier)

~~~
jonnycomputer
Can you not have consciousness without free will?

------
edoloughlin
Maybe I'm just dumb, but I have a problem taking anything meaningful from that
article. There's an ontological problem in defining consciousness in terms of
observations - this is circular because we don't have a meaningful starting
point so we should throw it all away and... then what?

------
lone_haxx0r
> The problem is that there could conceivably be brains that perform all the
> same sensory and decision-making functions as ours but in which there is no
> conscious experience. That is, there could be brains that react as though
> sad but that don’t feel sadness, brains that can discriminate between
> wavelengths of light but that don’t see red or yellow or blue or any other
> color, brains that direct their bodies to eat certain foods but that don’t
> taste them. So why is there nevertheless something that it’s like to be us?

I don't think so. What even is this "conscious experience"? I hypothesize that
it's an illusion. A sufficiently complex robot would indeed have the same
"conscious experience". Qualia is nothing more than complex arrangements of
molecules in our brains, it's an abstraction, not something fundamental to the
universe. Maybe stars and planets too have some sort of rudimentary "conscious
experience".

I can't prove this, but you can't prove that you have "conscious experience"
either.

> that no physical property or set of properties can explain what it’s like to
> be conscious.

I think that it can be explained but we just don't have enough knowledge of
the internal workings of the brain yet.

For some reason I get really exalted when people such as the author disagree
with me on this, of all topics. I don't know what it is, maybe it makes me
angry that people _don 't realize_ it. I know that sounds really arrogant
(specially when author has a phd in philosophy), and I might be wrong and look
like an idiot, but I can't control this feeling. I feel the same way a teenage
atheist feels when he hears a religious person speak about god (I know this
because I was that teenage atheist).

~~~
ambrop7
If a brain performs the same sensory and decision-making functions, it is
_also_ going to claim that it feels emotions and experiences colors in
particular ways. For all practical purpose, such a brain is conscious.

------
crazygringo
For anyone curious for more, the article surprisingly doesn't bother to
mention the philosophical name given to this view:

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

> _" In philosophy, idealism is the group of metaphysical philosophies that
> assert that reality, or reality as humans can know it, is fundamentally
> mental, mentally constructed, or otherwise immaterial. Epistemologically,
> idealism manifests as a skepticism about the possibility of knowing any
> mind-independent thing. In contrast to materialism, idealism asserts the
> primacy of consciousness as the origin and prerequisite of material
> phenomena. According to this view, consciousness exists before and is the
> pre-condition of material existence. Consciousness creates and determines
> the material and not vice versa."_

------
xamuel
One assumption people often take for granted about consciousness is that
everyone is conscious. I agree we should operate under that assumption for the
purposes of making ethical decisions, but I think we should challenge it for
the purpose of trying to understand consciousness better. What if
philosophical zombies aren't just a hypothetical thought experiment, what if
some people are conscious and others only pretend to be conscious? Is there
some particular event that triggers consciousness?

Lacan thought that consciousness is triggered by looking in a mirror (or
something equivalent to a mirror). If someone was carefully raised without the
ability to look in a mirror, see their own shadow, hear their own voice, etc.,
would they never become conscious? How could you tell?

What if consciousness is triggered by something totally unexpected, like:
circumcision; submersion baptism; chicken pox; or some particular bacteria in
my gut? I can find someone who never had chicken pox and ask them if they're
conscious, but how do I know if they're answering truthfully?

Everyone has a big incentive to profess consciousness, because anyone who
professed non-consciousness would be in danger of losing the privileges and
protections which society grants to conscious people.

~~~
rabidrat
We are all not-conscious for large swaths of the day. We think we are
conscious all of the time, because it is only when we are conscious that we
think to think about it. So we subconsciously maintain a kind of linked-list
of conscious periods, and so the illusion of permanent/static consciousness
persists. But there are gaps between every conscious period, which are
scarcely noticeable unless you have figured out to look for them. (It is a
paradox of the mind that there can be awareness during non-conscious periods).

~~~
gpderetta
To this day I still can't say 100% that I'm fully conscious during some deep
hacking session when I'm in the zone.

~~~
goatlover
Aren’t you conscious of the code and what the code is supposed to be doing?

~~~
gpderetta
Usually I code in phases, figuring out the solution, which requires a lot of
thinking and expermenting and trials and errors, but once I find what I think
is a promising solution I might end up writing lots of code; in this phase I
sort of feel that the code comes out of me without a clear conscious effort.
This phase might last a few hours or a few days and I'm often limited by my
typing speed and the responsiveness of my editor; in a away the code on the
screen becomes part of my mental process (similarly sometimes I have to
scribble on a piece of paper just to get my mental processes runnin). After
that, I snap out and start compiling the code (I program in c++, so 10s of
thousands of lines of errors are routine), clean it up and usually end up
deleting large chunks of code. Note I'm fully aware of the code I have written
but have little recollection of the actual act of writing. After this I might
switch to write tests (which Is a much more conscious activity) or move back
to phase one.

I'm fully aware that's not how most developers work, according to my boss,
when I tell him I haven't compiled my code in a few days, I'm just strange.

~~~
goatlover
> I'm just strange.

Maybe. Who am I to judge?

------
ph4
For those interested in potential viable ontologies other than reductive
physicalism, I encourage you to read the works of Bernardo Kastrup. His most
recent book, The Idea of the World, is well-argued and very interesting.

------
matiasz
Two physicists and a philosopher recently published a similar article that
makes this point even more cogently, in my opinion.

“The blind spot of science is the neglect of lived experience”
[https://aeon.co/essays/the-blind-spot-of-science-is-the-
negl...](https://aeon.co/essays/the-blind-spot-of-science-is-the-neglect-of-
lived-experience)

------
Symmetry
_The problem is that there could conceivably be brains that perform all the
same sensory and decision-making functions as ours but in which there is no
conscious experience._

That's really not true. In Neural Correlates of Consciousness research there
are two very important things people can only do for experiences that they're
consciously aware of: remember then and communicate about them. Someone with
blindsight can pick up and apple in front of them as well as a sighted person.
But give them a blindfold and they won't be able to reach for the spot their
eyes once knew the apple was located in. And they can't tell anyone what is in
front of them either.

~~~
TimTheTinker
The examples you give are of brains for which there _is_ conscious experience,
at least in some areas. For an existing consciousness-capable brain to have
some capabilities that are both unconscious and memory-inaccessible does not
disprove the potential existence of fully-functional, non-conscious brains.

Although I'd agree that otherwise functional non-conscious brains would
probably be unable to communicate coherently about personal
experiences/thoughts/memories/etc.

------
Lowkeyloki
I don't know if this "problem" can ever truly be "solved" as there's not
really a way to prove there to be a difference between something truly
"feeling" emotions compared to faking it convincingly. I have to wonder at
what point the difference becomes moot, a sort of Chinese room for emotions. I
tend to lean towards solipsism when it comes to this kind of stuff, though.
Does the difference actually matter?

~~~
ambrop7
I could argue that even people who genuinely feel emotions have,
unconsciously, learned to feel them through their interactions with other
people. Who can prove to me that emotions are something fundamental to humans
and not acquired through culture? In a sense, everyone may as well be faking
it.

~~~
Lowkeyloki
So you're positing that emotions are a cultural virus.

------
LocalH
I personally feel that some of the answers regarding consciousness and
sentience may be found when we finally destigmatize psychedelics and allow
structured, ethical studies and real analysis. Anyone who has had a really
profound psychedelic experience knows that there is _something_ more to our
minds than we all realize. We barely know how it works, and it can't easily
even really be explained to one who hasn't had a psychedelic experience.

Note that I am not advocating reckless exploration of psychedelics. A person
needs to do a lot of research and self-reflection to put themselves in the
mindset to even consider tripping. But for those who can handle them, there
are paths to self-growth and self-repair that are unmatched in modern
medicine.

Personally, my (unfounded but by personal experience) belief is that what we
know as consciousness or sentience is driven by a specific balance of
psychoactive substances that are naturally metabolized in the body and brain,
and many neurological disorders are due to an imbalance in those substances.
DMT helped me take great steps towards fighting ADHD

------
manifestsilence
The only sane and productive model of consciousness I've encountered (and I've
been around a bunch through growing up in the Transcendental Meditation
movement) has been the one described in Hofstadter's works, such as Godel,
Escher, Bach.

He talks about consciousness as an epiphenomenon, where the pattern itself is
what makes something conscious, rather than some magical property that some
matter has and other matter doesn't. With mathematical precision, he describes
how consciousness relates to the ability to self-reference and how this
relates to fundamental paradoxes in various fields such as the Halting
Problem, Godel's Incompleteness Theorems, Russel's Paradox, and the works of
Escher and Bach.

This line of thinking brings up some very interesting moral questions: What is
it about life that makes us want to value it? Why do we have the notion of
"higher" and "lower" life forms and value some species more highly than
others? If we created a sufficiently advanced AI, that gave all the
appearances of having feelings, a sense of self preservation, an identity, and
desires, would it be immoral to unplug it or control its freedoms? What if it
felt and understood even more than a human? Would its needs supersede our own?

Anyway, I highly recommend that book, GEB. It has made most other
philosophizing about consciousness seem flat to me.

~~~
John_KZ
>What is it about life that makes us want to value it?

That's an excellent question. All the questions about consciousness are
probably an attempt to better understand (and avoid?) death.

However I still have a hard time imagining a scenario where we can
scientifically understand consciousness. Eventually we will understand all
about how the mind works. All the various processes and how they lead to
higher functions like thinking consciously in natural language etc. We'll be
able to manipulate and alter our conscious experience. But even if there was a
neural switch to turn consciousness on and off, we would still fail to
convince ourselves of the physical nature of it, as we could never experience
a state without consciousness.

My personal belief is that although we are painfully physical, we will never
explain why we're actually here, experiencing those calculations, or in fact
being them. Being calculations of a meat sack. Why would this happen?

~~~
manifestsilence
Yeah, I agree with the sense of mystery you talk about. To me the two great,
and linked, mysteries are why matter, space, time, etc. exists at all, and why
some part of it experiences it in a self-aware way. They're both meta-
questions to me, that probably can't be answered from within the universe by
observing it, just like how one of Godel's Incompleteness Theorems says
arithmetic cannot prove its own consistency from within. I know that's playing
fast and loose with math metaphors, but it's an analogy not a rigorous proof.

------
TaupeRanger
This thread is depressingly chock-full of people who just do not understand
the argument being made here. The same tired old counterarguments of "it's
just like elan vitale was before we understood biology" are being trotted out
again and again, with no attempt at understanding how flawed that talking
point is (and has been for years).

------
otakucode
>It’s as though someone created a very elaborate spreadsheet and carefully
defined how the values in every cell would be related to the values in all of
the other cells. However, if no one enters a definite value for at least one
of these cells, then none of the cells will have values.

Does it sound to anyone else like the author would benefit tremendously from
learning the Lambda Calculus? It seems to me to be a disproof of the authors
contention that a 'definite value' is needed at some point.

------
d1zzy
I think the problem is looked at in a confusing way. On one hand, we use a
scientific/empiric analysis of the success of science to explain consciousness
on the other we are ready to admit science may not be able to explain it but
we don't apply the same rigorous mechanism to test the non-scientific
explanation of it. I also think we are not seeing the forest from the trees
and are too hooked up to some kind of "magic explanation" of consciousness
that is defined by having people explain their experience.

I'm a strong proponent of the "what acts like a duck is a duck" principle. If
in the future we manage to create machines which will be, for a very large
statistical value, indistinguishable from a human in terms of behavior (that
is, make the Turing test seem like a childish joke), is it fair then to say
that those are just machines made to emulate our behavior and don't really
reflect "real" consciousness? Why is it fair to define consciousness just as
something that humans and personal human experience can decide?

Yes, machines may never have human consciousness, but if for all intends and
purposes they behave as having one, then they have one, in my opinion.

Also, saying that humans are more than biochemical machines is the same like
saying that my home gaming PC is more than wires and electrons. Yes, the
experience enabled by the software running on those wires and electrons goes
beyond just the physical support for it but that doesn't mean, that at the end
of the day it isn't just wires and electrons.

------
flipcoder
I've also heard that it could be that everything that exists, is "potentially
conscious", such that if it is connected in such a way where it can experience
and actuate, it can become aware of it's own essence, and that consciousness
is just the first person experience of the universe itself. That idea is
interesting but it doesn't quite solve anything, since the harder problem is
figuring out exactly how the brain awakens it.

------
chaoticmass
I've wondered this myself-- what if instead of the brain growing the create
consciousness, it grows to receive consciousness? Like a tree growing to
receive light.

------
Causality1
>The problem is that there could conceivably be brains that perform all the
same sensory and decision-making functions as ours but in which there is no
conscious experience. That is, there could be brains that react as though sad
but that don’t feel sadness, brains that can discriminate between wavelengths
of light but that don’t see red or yellow or blue

That's an assertion I believe to not be so obvious it can be assumed to be
correct with no argument to the contrary. If you can't define consciousness
why do you believe it exists independent of these other systems and that these
other systems exist independent of it? The study of consciousness is
absolutely full of non-falsifiable claims like this. We decide apes and dogs
and frogs and ants are not sapient but that is an outside observation. It may
be as erroneous as looking at Specimen A and its great to the five hundredth
generation ancestor and deciding that because they should count as two
separate species there must have been some momentous leap in the middle to
make Specimen A possible. Consciousness could easily be a smooth spectrum from
human to insect and we wouldn't know it because everything next to our level
is extinct.

------
viach
Is there a formal language in philosophy? So that one can define the input
formulas (axioms) and with some kind of "philosophy math" calculate things
like "what is the meaning of life and everything" and "what is consciousness"?

Otherwise for me it all looks like words juggling continuing for many
centuries. They really should implement a programming language for philosophy
and outsource the hard parts to Ukraine.

~~~
dmreedy
There is indeed. It's called Formal Logic, and the broad class of philosophers
who have attempted that program you describe are usually referred to as
"Analytic Philosophers".

They haven't made a ton of progress (I mean that as a statement of fact, not
disrespect), and tend to tackle much more primitive, foundational problems
than what the Continental philosophers like to deal in ("what is the meaning
of everything" and all that).

Turns out it's a pretty hard problem to even pin down exactly what a word
means, or what a name is, much less what the meaning of everything is. The
trick is, those questions _are_ the axioms. And so the act of asserting them
is a philosophical act in and of themselves. The rest is just moving stones
around.

~~~
viach
Thanks for clarifying things to me, I didn't even know the "Analytic
Philosophers" term exists.

> They haven't made a ton of progress

But they progress is what should be provable and repeatable, like the real
science requires? So probably, this kind of progress is the only real one in
the field?

~~~
dmreedy
Absolutely, but that's not the interesting part. The problem boils down to the
fact that any kind of formal proof system is only "truth-preserving
machinery"; that is, you can't get out something "truer" than what you put in.
It doesn't introduce new truths into the world, it just permutes existing ones
so that different facets of them are clear.

But when you're trying ask big questions about the nature of truth itself, a
proof doesn't get you very far! You're trying to get at the thing that has to
be assumed as a prior or axiom in order for the proof machinery to do what it
does. Given our current understanding of the universe, a proof in any formal
system can never tell you "why" the thing that it proved was true. Just how it
got there.

------
oneiroviator
After reading this somewhat innocuous article and then going through this
thread... I think the reason there is so much heated discussion here is that
the simple suggestion to invert one's assumptions regarding physical reality
and consciousness, also implies an inversion of responsibility.

If it really is the case that consciousness is the basis for reality, then it
must also mean that only you, the reader, can find this out for yourself. Then
this means you cannot fall back to preachers or scientific publications. It's
up to you to do the work. From my experience, even just mentioning this idea
of goal-driven contemplative practice often finds a lot of resistance if you
don't approach it carefully.

------
entwife
This article reminds me of the difficulty ascribing meaning to data. The
meaning of a series of bits - ASCII or Unicode, data or executable - is
dependent on consciousness to give it meaning. Much like all of the physical
observations of science.

------
louwrentius
How is it that an article that basically describes the concept of qualia never
once mention the word?

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

~~~
zamalek
It doesn't _exactly._ I think this quote really clarifies what the article is
trying to discuss:

> While physical properties cannot explain consciousness, _consciousness is
> needed to explain physical properties._

If consciousness is (and, yes, qualia are) how we perceive reality, how can we
define consciousness based on observation? It would be like trying to use a
telescope to capture an image of itself.

If "consciousness comes first" that means that consciousness contains reality,
not visa-versa.

~~~
naasking
> It would be like trying to use a telescope to capture an image of itself.

Which you can do with the equivalent of a mirror. So assuming your analogy
holds, then we just need to discover the equivalent of a consciousness mirror.

As for the article itself:

> While physical properties cannot explain consciousness, consciousness is
> needed to explain physical properties.

This is conjecture. There is literally no proof that physical properties
cannot explain consciousness, nor is there proof that consciousness is needed
to explain physical properties.

------
drbojingle
Why are we Conscious? I think the answer, at a very high level, must be that
evolution followed the path of least resistance: consciousness has high value
per amount of energy expended on it and is easy to achieve.

------
gashaw
I think consciousness is one of those things that is not defined well enough
for us to understand it. Until there is a breakthrough in the understanding of
consciousness itself there won't be any real conscious ai.

It's like when we learned to fly, we needn't understand how birds' wings work.
We had to understand the principles of aerodynamics or what is flying itself.

That's why I think imitating the brain won't work, (deep learning etc.) just
like the early attempts to fly didn't, even if we'll know the function of
every single neuron.

------
chiefalchemist
> "...brains that can discriminate between wavelengths of light but that don’t
> see red or yellow or blue or any other color..."

Well. I operate under the idea that we can only perceive three colors.
Everything else is based on the brain's interpretation of that input. That is,
for example, we don't see purple, the brain invents purple.

That aside, simply put, reality is a consensus. And it exists collectiveky for
those who buy into that agreement.

------
sandinmytea
If so, this would be backed by a great many ancient sources on this topic.

If so, it also creates great need to ponder how consciousness(es) are made to
respond to their effects on others. If consciousness IS as wisdom traditions
state, also what is needed is not empiricism, but plain commitment to
respecting each other.

After all, saying "okay - if I exist regardless, what gives?" Others do too,
and might also some reason or actual thing which makes this possible - and to
honor that possibility is actually to behave safer, have more pleasant
dealings, and ultimately concern ourselves with best practices in getting the
most of what we get in addition to our bare consciousness.

If it can exist without any particular structure, it can be placed in other
circumstances less desireable.

I.e. every cultural tradition regarding virtue and karma, and G-d.

I see evidence that the scientifically minded would be thrilled to know the
makings of this, even if it would be n=1 revelation. I feel like the
traditions given us are sensibly concerned with preserving awareness of these
lately-arriving observations of upper dimensional/physics-derived
approximations of how our selves are maintained in this projection by
[previously unseen/ allegorically hinted in tradition] structures which are
indeed real.

yadda yadda.. the wisest people always say this, and they themselves often got
there the hard way, and yet report good and thankful circumstances from
choosing respectful behavior.

So its somewhat able to be "controlled-for." The least-empirical and most
curious, agenda-less, all say: do right, there is a supporting element that
deserves respect, and since we do exist "hereafter" by some model in many
different ways, its always worth not EXCLUDING this.

If we ARE, then what currently we are is only a portion. That creates
curiosity and investigation - I do it. I discover what I didn't expect. Now I
hope others do, and do better at getting this idea to those who refuse its
possibility.

If so - if we are - that is to say, we exist regardless - it also means
there's much to concern regarding not combating factors that will otherwise
never preserve us. Instead, preserving mutual respect is greatest beneath
whatever preserves all - because there would be no way free of the "other" if
forever allowed for any result.

------
cestith
Does consciousness itself suffer from intractability similar to Gödel's
incompleteness theorems? Is there a consistent set of axioms that can even
include all the truths about what we mean when we say "consciousness"? If so,
can we go further and use consciousness to actually fully enumerate all the
interactions necessary for it or all the implications of it from within a
conscious system?

------
pippy
This article highlights a massive issue with the field of philosophy in which
there's a disconnect between advancements in neuroimaging analysis and
metaphysics. The author claims that physical properties define "nothing at
all". Yet what they tell are extremely valuable in emulating these systems and
what they can teach us with the exploding fields of ML and AI. In the last
decade big improvements have been made in the field neuroimaging. Trying to
put the pieces together from neuroscience and emulation to lessons learnt is
hard, but possible.

There's a worrying trend that's becoming more apparent in regards to the hard
problem of consciousness. New neuroimaging analysis techniques indicates that
when you take away individual functional elements of how the brain, we're left
not much at all. At what point does a series of embedded components become a
computer? At what point does a series of neural networks become conscious?

This is going to be an issue we're going to have to address now. Where is the
line of conscious for an individual to make a legal choice? Think of someone
wanting assisted suicide, in which they're often in a debilitated state. A
call is going needed to be made if they're sentient enough. A tough call given
it carries the massive burden. If we continue improving ML and AI we're going
to have to make the call from the other end as well.

------
hcarvalhoalves
I've recently watched this talk titled "Your brain hallucinates your conscious
reality" [1] by Anil Seth, seems relevant to the topic. If you are intrigued
by the question of the original article you might like the TED talk.

[1]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lyu7v7nWzfo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lyu7v7nWzfo)

------
sgt101
I wonder why we believe that the evolution that has equiped us to be conscious
and to wonder about consciousness (which I think is probably part of the deal
of consciousness) has provided us with minds and languages that can understand
or discuss it? In fact, it seems quite likely that being able to understand
consciousness has no evolutionary value at all!

------
garamirez
From my (very) personal point of view, I think consciousness has nothing to do
with sensor or motor functions...we know so little about what we (as humans)
and "conscious" beings really are that we're always in the realm of
conjectures. Self-awareness is a so complicated subject to define anyways.

------
LordHumungous
> there could conceivably be brains that perform all the same sensory and
> decision-making functions as ours but in which there is no conscious
> experience.

That makes no sense to me. What is consciousness but a mechanism for making
decisions? A brain that has all of our decision making functions would be
conscious by definition.

------
tim333
>the question of why we have conscious experience at all.

Maybe because being conscious rather than say knocked unconscious is an
advantage for survival and reproduction?

While that is semi joking, consciousness quite likely arose as a functional,
being aware of what's going on, thing with qualia (what it feels like) a kind
of side effect.

------
DennisP
Bernardo Kastrup has written some compelling books arguing that idealism is
more rational and skeptical than materialism. The best introduction is
probably _Why Materialism Is Baloney_. A more academic version, consisting
mostly of peer-reviewed papers, is _The Idea of the World_.

------
PeterStuer
All models are wrong, some models are useful.

I could start by dissecting the article and detail the sloppyness in the
reasoning, the strawman of ignoring emergence, the value and inevitability of
referential semantics etc, but ultimately the deeper question remains:

How is the proposed model supposed to be useful?

------
Analemma_
> For this reason, the “what it’s like” to be a conscious mind can’t be
> described in the purely relational, dispositional terms accessible to
> science. There’s just no way to get there from here.

Chalmers can keep saying this until he’s blue in the face, but it doesn’t make
it true.

~~~
zepto
People can keep denying this until they are blue in the face but it doesn’t
make it false.

~~~
blacksqr
The burden of proof rests on those asserting that something is true.

~~~
CharlesColeman
> The burden of proof rests on those asserting that something is true.

That's nonsense. I'm sure you can re-write most if not all assertions that
"something is false" as equivalent assertions that "something else is true,"
therefore the burden of proof rests equally on everyone asserting anything.

~~~
blacksqr
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam%27s_razor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam%27s_razor)

------
youdontknowtho
I still don't understand what people mean when they say something like

"Rather than trying to reduce consciousness to fit into the box of
relational/dispositional properties, it is time that we begin to explore it
for what it is—and for the answers that studying it on its own terms, in its
full splendor and variety, stands to provide."

What are you supposed to do with that? What does recognizing the ontological
primacy of consciousness actually entail?

A lot of this sounds like the kind of "center of what's known" fallacies that
plagued human thought in the pre-scientific era. The sun isn't central to
anything, the Earth isn't central to anything, human consciousness is probably
not central to anything either. Why wouldn't that pattern hold here. Why
wouldn't we just be wrong about how unique consciousness is?

------
proc0
Still doesn't explain what it is, therefore it is almost pointless to answer
this. Not sure how whether it came first, second or third matters to
explaining what it really is and its relationship on reality.

------
eternalny1
I went through the whole indoctrinated-religious, "devout" atheist,
"scientific" agnostic, and now I guess I'm a theist.

Why? Because I read a book on consciousness that came like a bolt out of the
blue and I understood that we do not understand.

I don't buy this "emergent property of the mind" thing because while I
understand evolutionary theory I am not sure how you bridge that gap to
subjective experience.

I have absolutely no clue what this "god" is that I accepted, but I know I'm
not going to be punished for leaving this comment.

EDIT: just read the comments. I've been to BNL and CERN.

~~~
Voloskaya
> I understood that we do not understand

There are many things we don't understand, and as time pass we gradually
understand more and more of them. What does this have to do with the existence
or not of God? Do you go back and forth between atheist/theist every time a
new answer is discovered and a new question is asked?

~~~
vlunkr
This idea is called "God of the gaps"
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God_of_the_gaps](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God_of_the_gaps).

~~~
dogofthegasp
Christian mystical theology has never had a problem with the god of the gaps
argument. It's always postulated that God was something so utterly alien from
us (prior to time itself!) that we can know him only through revelation. The
nature of God lies in the realm of the unknown, for our finite minds cannot
grasp the infinite. Knowledge of God is given only through experience and his
grace. What has been revealed is logic-defying and mind-bending, although it
has a certain paternicity of its own.

Whether the God of the Gaps points you towards atheism or theism depends on
your concept of the unknown. If you think of it as a fixed sized bucket of
things gradually trending towards zero due to the effort of science, then you
are an atheist. If you think of the unknown as practically limitless in size
and our process of discovery as barely scratching the surface, then you are
pointed towards theism. Generally, materialists trend towards the former and
phenomenologists towards the latter.

~~~
vlunkr
As the wikipedia article stats, the idea was proposed first by Christians
rather than skeptics, arguing that it's a weak form of faith, so you're
definitely right on that point.

> Whether the God of the Gaps points you towards atheism or theism depends on
> your concept of the unknown

I really like this assessment. Looking at the sibling comments here, most seem
to think all questions will be answered eventually, but I suppose that's
impossible to know, since we don't even know what all the questions are yet.

------
hi41
I don’t agree that consciousness came first. Before I was born, there was a
large amount of time when I and my consciousness did not exist. Yet the
objective world as we know exited then.

------
blacksqr
>The issue is that physical properties are by their nature relational,
dispositional properties. That is, they describe the way that something is
related to other things

Author neglects to mention that this may apply to everything except the
universe itself.

>Something in the universe has to have some kind of quality in and of itself
to give all the other relational/dispositional properties any meaning.
Something has to get the ball rolling.

The "something" may be the universe, i.e. its total wave function. Occam's
Razor suggests looking for simple explanations rather than assuming the
existence of things not detectable.

Could the universe itself be conscious? Making such a claim would seem to make
the author's argument a tautology.

~~~
o_nate
That's an interesting idea though it's hard to see how it would work in
practice. In practice, our scientific concepts are ultimately grounded in
observational data, data accessible to a conscious observer. I don't see how
scientific concepts could be restated in terms of the universe as a whole,
especially when one considers we only have very indefinite information about
the ultimate characteristics of it.

~~~
blacksqr
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_wavefunction](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_wavefunction)

------
mensetmanusman
Commence with the 'there is no free will' crowd followed by argumentation that
assumes free will (in order to change people's minds... which they have no
control over).

------
ilaksh
Christof Koch on consciousness
[https://youtu.be/piHkfmeU7Wo](https://youtu.be/piHkfmeU7Wo)

------
newsreview1
I may get pooh poohed here, but to me, this discussion is one of a spiritual
nature. My belief is that God created all things spiritually first, before he
created them physically. And, God is what gives all life it's sentience.
Understanding the brain is only part f the equation. The soul of man (and
woman) is both the physical body (including the brain) and the spirit. Until
we can fully grasp the spiritual, we will never be able to make the "leap"
between paper and conscience. Anyone else feel this way?

~~~
kartan
If the spirit interacts with the brain, then a spirit is a phisical thing that
can be measured and is in the realm of science. If the spirit does not
interact with the brain, then its existence does not have any effect and it is
irrelevant to understand consciousness.

------
buboard
The hard problem will be a very hard even after it has been solved.
Philosophers dont even want it solved, they just like to discuss it.

~~~
Anon84
As with any other philosophical problem. Discussing it _is_ the point.

~~~
buboard
The hard problem is leaking dangerously into the real world though. Chalmers'
original paper posited consciousness as a _physical_ quantity, which
presumably could be empirically studied.

~~~
naasking
I don't think so, because to Chalmers it's an epiphenomenon, and so has no
influence on the outside world. Only our minds experience consciousness, but
as an epiphenomenon it doesn't influence our behaviour one bit, so to
Chalmers, we might actually not even have consciousness and are simply deluded
in thinking we do.

Exclamations of "but I _know_ I'm conscious!" would mirror exactly those of a
p-zombie who wasn't conscious.

~~~
buboard
Chalmers' consciousness is not an epiphenomenon, it s an entity of its own,
but not part of the physical world

> I suggest that a theory of consciousness should take experience as
> fundamental. We know that a theory of consciousness requires the addition of
> something fundamental to our ontology, as everything in physical theory is
> compatible with the absence of consciousness. We might add some entirely new
> nonphysical feature, from which experience can be derived, but it is hard to
> see what such a feature would be like. More likely, we will take experience
> itself as a fundamental feature of the world, alongside mass, charge, and
> space-time. If we take experience as fundamental, then we can go about the
> business of constructing a theory of experience.

The problem that most physicalists see is that this introduces an entity
seemingly needlessly, which breaks occam's razor.

------
ilaksh
This "problem" is mainly a symptom of religious worldviews that are still
holding out deep inside some heads.

------
carapace
You can study consciousness, but not scientifically. The "trick" is that,
though you can't make a scientific instrument to detect or measure
consciousness, you do have one "instrument" to use: your own consciousness.
For example, two people can "merge" and experience themselves as one.

~~~
lostmsu
That's unsubstantiated. Arguably, an ability of a person to play any specific
multiplayer game at a specific time can be reasonably thought as a measure of
consciousness. Then a simple ranking can be used to assign a number.

It is a good theory as it clearly works with drugs, sleepiness, etc

------
ARandomerDude
I wonder if she knows this is essentially the Kalam cosmological argument for
God's existence.

 _The heavens declare the glory of God, and the sky above proclaims his
handiwork. Day to day pours out speech, and night to night reveals knowledge._
(Psalm 19:1-2, ESV)

------
basicplus2
What if self awareness comes first?

------
glitchc
What if it doesn’t?

There, see how easy that was?

------
artur_makly
Dreams —- to me pose as the lowest hanging fruit to peeling the viscous
mutable layers of ...our consciousness.

------
zarmin
See also: Dean Radin

------
ilovecaching
Just a summary of Wittgenstein's Tractatus

------
mikekchar
I can answer a little bit of the question. Why do rotten eggs smell like
rotten eggs and not roses? The answer is: it's actually arbitrary.

In my 20s I broke my leg fairly badly. It damaged the nerve, but luckily left
the sheath of the nerve undamaged. The end result was that half my foot was
paralysed. What I never realised is that if the nerve sheath is undamaged, the
nerve will regrow! So slowly over time I started to get feeling back in my
foot. I don't know exactly what goes on, but I'd get this sharp shooting pain,
like a needle in my foot and slowly after each time, I'd regain a little bit
of feeling (I don't know... is that just the nerve endings "reattaching"???)

Eventually, I got pretty much all the feeling back... except it wasn't mapped
properly. The space between my toes felt like the sole of my foot and various
other strangeness. Slowly I got used to it. A few years later, my brain had
completely translated everything and the space between my toes felt like the
space between my toes. Even though I know it's mapped differently I can't
consciously distinguish between the feelings I have now and the feelings
before I broke my leg.

So a rose smells like a rose because the receptors that are activated when you
smell a rose are different from the receptors that are activated when you
smell a rotten egg. It's just like the nerve endings between my toes are
different than the nerve endings on the sole of my foot. But it's just input
for your brain, nothing more. Of course we have an aversion to the smell of
rotten eggs, but that's just hard wired -- more input for the brain. There are
lots of people who have aversion to smells that other people like.

In terms of "consciousness", I think it's likely an illusion of sorts. We
experience a kind of continuum of consciousness. In reality, though, there is
only an instant. Our awareness is an artefact of our memory.

Behaviour couldn't exist without a feedback loop. For those of us who are
programmers, this is pretty obvious. In order to have a state machine, the new
output needs to not only look at new input, but also its current state. Every
instant we exist we are processing new input and also our current state (which
seems to prioritise recent inputs). We exist instantaneously, but because we
are processing previous data along with new data, it creates an illusion of
having existed over a continuum. Additionally, the only reason we have an ego
is simply because our data networks are isolated. If I could access the data
of another brain in the same way I can access data in my own brain, there
would be no way to distinguish between the "two of us". There would be no way
to distinguish between "my thoughts" and "somebody else's thoughts". "I" would
not exist... or rather "I" would be the "two of us". It's just an artificial
distinction based on a lack of ability to access the data.

Or at least that's the way I look at it. There is no way to know for sure. It
might just be the FSM manipulating me like a puppet.

~~~
7373737373
I wouldn't call the mapping necessarily arbitrary. The causal/information
processes that your nerves connect to may have some mathematical structure
that distinguishes them.

There's the symmetry theory of valence which proposes that symmetric (in some
strict mathematical sense) processes feel good, and vice versa with bad
qualia.

But this is only one of many subproblems: [https://opentheory.net/wp-
content/uploads/2016/11/Eight-Prob...](https://opentheory.net/wp-
content/uploads/2016/11/Eight-Problems2-1-1024x611.png)

------
syn0byte
We will be able to explain and understand consciousness in objective terms 1
second after the first person achieves flight by pulling themselves into the
air with the bucket they are standing in. About 5 seconds after a computer can
run a 100% simulation of itself running a 100% simulation of itself. A whole
minute after someone writes a program that can tell if/when any other programs
will stop running.

As a question that's dogged us for thousands of years, maybe its time to
accept its just a shitty question.

~~~
drclau
Nonsense. Consciousness is a matter of information processing. We're just
biological computers running a program. The so called hard problem of
consciousness is really just folklore by now. Neuroscience will eventually
provide a complete explanation of consciousness. I'm frankly surprised we
still think in magical terms about consciousness, in this time and age,
knowing all we know about how the universe works, knowing how the brain works.

Pragmatic philosophers, such as Thomas Metzinger, have already accepted the
failure of philosophy in this regard, and support the neuroscience approach.

I can refer you to Thomas Metzinger's book, "The Ego Tunnel: The Science of
the Mind and the Myth of the Self". He went through great efforts to make it
accessible to laypersons, such as myself. It's well worth the time.

Side note, I got to Thomas Metzinger from Peter Watts' Firefall. He says
something along the lines "Metzinger is THE man" (will try to find the exact
text and come back with an edit at some point).

------
visarga
Sorry to be so direct, but I have to say it like this otherwise it doesn't get
through.

Consciousness is that which makes us go take something to eat in the morning
so we don't die of hunger, keeps us from running into cars or falling off a
high place, allows us to work and be intelligent in our actions so that we
cover our needs, guides us to form relations and make babies (thus replicate
consciousness further).

I think we are agents with the purpose of survival and reproduction. That is
only possible by adaptation to the environment, including society and nature.
While we're busy at keeping ourselves alive, we have to act intelligently and
learn from our mistakes. There is nothing outside the realm of physics and
nature, just plain old agent+environment+learning+self-replication.

It feels like something to see blue (or to be a bat) because it is linked to
survival, because we have senses and brains to create models of the world,
because we have positive and negative signals (rewards) that guide our present
and future actions and the value we attach to all life situations, and
ultimately because life depends on it and self-replication would eliminate
inefficient agents and leave those who are fit.

In short, consciousness is an adaptation mechanism in service of self
replication in an environment with limited resources and competition.

I think all this dualist incredulity towards science is bullshit. Instead, the
evolutionary process and the reinforcement learning process are sufficient to
explain it. If we want to learn about consciousness we should not look only at
the brain but at the environment and its limitations. It is the environment
that shaped consciousness into existence.

I know it's not as poetic as souls and hard-problems, but it is the simplest
explanation that fits.

~~~
attilakun
Many people would reject your definition of consciousness. You can easily
imagine a universe where agents perform all the activities you listed, but
without an experiential flavour to them. It would all be an "empty" process,
much like a simulation in software except with more complex rules.

Yet our universe seems nothing like this. There is an experiential flavour to
it which everyone has access to from a first person perspective.

~~~
visarga
I am not convinced that a successful agent in a competition driven environment
could be an empty process. It would have values based on the utility of its
actions . Sensations plus values equals experiential flavor.

------
asfarley
This seems so intuitively wrong to me; like postulating that Windows is
necessary for assembly to exist.

Almost none of the preliminary claims in this article feel compelling to me:
"no physical property or set of properties can explain what it’s like to be
conscious". Where is the proof of this? All the author does is re-state this
sentence in different ways.

I imagine people have had similar conversations throughout history: "no one
can really predict weather", "no-one understands economics", "no-one
understands what makes people fall in love"; but would you claim that (for
example) love is the trigger, or boundary condition which causes reality to
coalesce?

The claims which _do_ feel believeable are: 1) Many aspects of physical
reality are relational 2) Some boundary conditions are necessary in order to
make everything well-defined

But there is a real gap from the points above, to the conclusion that
consciousness is the missing boundary-condition. Maybe we just haven't
discovered the missing boundary-condition yet. Or maybe there is none, and
reality is ill-defined.

Everyone who's going on about "we don't know enough about the brain to even
START this" feels like a Sunday-school teacher telling me not to question the
Greater Truths. It's a thought-killing sentiment. It's a subconscious defense
mechanism for people who can't admit that they're a mostly-deterministic
machine.

~~~
leafeewick
I think Elon's neurolink will shed more light on the shroud of mystery that is
consciousness.

Maybe not, but I think there are people who are saying "damn the nay sayers"
and just trying shit that they think can give some insight into how everything
functions, up there.

------
sklivvz1971
What a useless article.

Consciousness is not an impossible problem. It only becomes absurd if it's
tinted of mysticism and dipped into a half-digested understanding of the
current scientific consensus.

First, let's demystify conscience. Scientifically, there's no soul - it's a
religious concept that has no meaning outside of it. What's left of conscience
is its shell, its interface.

If we can model something that behaves like conscience, well, we created a
genuine conscience.

There are two sides to the shell of conscience. One is the outer shell: the
problem is to build something that appears to be conscient. This is a
reasonably hard CS or neurobiology problem but by no means impossible. We are
getting reasonably close to generating seemingly conscious automata. Surely
it's possible to see specific parts of the brain connected to this function:
for example, the speech center, and so on. So: hard to do, but doable.

The other part is the inner shell, or "self-conscience." This has to do with
perception, mostly, and abstraction. We have already created expert systems
that can perceive and give meaning to a lot of inputs.

The trick is creating a system that can perceive itself, its state like it
sees the world. This will require a general AI or strong AI, which is
currently believed by many experts to be possible although super hard to do.
Again though, this is a CS problem, it's addressable by science, and I have no
doubt it's a matter of time until we can settle it.

A machine with both characteristics would be just as alive as you or me. It
would perceive the world semantically. It would understand to be conscious,
and we would recognize it to be conscious too.

At that point, the question of consciousness will become once more only
attractive to philosophers and priests. The rest of us will have less problem
accepting one of these machines as "alive and conscious."

