
Toward a Mature Science of Consciousness - lainon
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5986937/
======
igammarays
John Vervaeke argues that much of our trouble with studying or defining
consciousness is due to its fundamentally recursive nature.

Start with the definition: A conscious being is one which is conscious of
itself.

Seems circular, but there is really no good non-recursive definition. This
definition also seems to "ring" perfectly well with random people on the
street.

It has been argued that any attempt at a non-recursive definition of
consciousness includes things which most people don't consider to be
conscious, see for example the paper titled "If Materialism Is True, the
United States Is Probably Conscious".

Which leads to the problem of identification: how do we know that rocks are
NOT conscious? Or, more interestingly, how I know the universe itself in its
totality is not conscious? The universe certainly must have all the requisite
"components" of consciousness, whatever those components are.

Once again, the process of identifying is recursive. A conscious being can
only identify, with 100% certainty, its own consciousness. Any "other" thing
could theoretically be a p-zombie or a Turing Test.

Corollary: No conscious being can know, with 100% certainty, that a particular
entity is NOT conscious.

Could we have a science of a recursive thing? Perhaps, but only if we are
willing and able to accept a recursive model with circular arguments.

~~~
xamuel
>No conscious being can know, with 100% certainty, that a particular entity is
NOT conscious.

You might be interested in a very short 2011 paper of mine, "A paradox related
to the Turing Test", on page 90 here:

[https://www.kent.ac.uk/secl/researchcentres/reasoning/TheRea...](https://www.kent.ac.uk/secl/researchcentres/reasoning/TheReasoner/vol5/TheReasoner-5\(6\).pdf)

I'll paraphrase the paradox here. Suppose you can magically detect conscious
entities. I begin speaking to you, and you are obliged to periodically guess
whether or not I'm conscious.

Here's what I'll do. Whenever you are guessing that I'm conscious, my entire
dialog will consist of nothing but "Uhhhh..." over and over, until you change
your mind and start thinking I'm non-conscious. Whenever you are guessing that
I'm non-conscious, then I'll speak normally.

Since I _AM_ conscious, and you have your magic conscious-detecting ability,
you should eventually reach a state where you're certain I'm conscious, and
you don't need to change your mind any more thereafter. But once we've reached
that state, which only takes finitely much time (so for all you know my whole
dialogue could've been a tape recording), thereafter I only ever say
"Uhhhh..." A non-conscious machine could do that, so do you change your mind?
If you do, contradiction, if you don't, contradiction.

~~~
credit_guy
I would reach the conclusion that you are conscious, but a bit obnoxious or
you like playing games.

~~~
xamuel
You're implicitly assuming that you yourself have free will and/or are too
complicated for a computer to mimic. Because if not, then I could just be a
computer which doesn't even hear the words you are saying, and is merely
reacting to the words I would hear if I did have ears (which I can do because
I have your entire sourcecode built into me).

The longer you meditate upon this very silly paradox, the more unsettling it
becomes :)

------
lisper
I found that Dan Dennett's "Consciousness Explained" really resonated with me.
His thesis is (as best I can condense a whole book to fit in an HN comment)
that consciousness is essentially an illusion produced by the brain as the
best model it can construct of the sensory input it receives. But the model
actually lags behind the present, and its history can be rewritten when new
information comes in. Dennett describes it much better than I do, and provides
a lot of experimental evidence. If nothing else, the experiments he describes
will make you see your own consciousness in a new light. I recommend reading
the book.

~~~
incadenza
I've always felt that Dennett has side stepped the question here. The 'hard
problem' here is to explain how a set of physical processes give rise to
consciousness or sensory experience at all. In other words, why the lights are
on.

As far as I can tell, consciousness is literally the one thing in the universe
that can't be an illusion. Even if, in the extreme case, we're brains in a
vat, etc.

~~~
joe_the_user
_The 'hard problem' here is to explain how a set of physical processes give
rise to consciousness or sensory experience at all. In other words, why the
lights are on._

But subjective experience isn't the light being "on" or "off". Subjective
experience is a messy, fuzzy collection of stuff. People do things without
intending to, people believe things they've automatically were intentional and
reverse. The zone between waking and sleeping isn't set, etc. etc.

If one does the "blind spot" experiment, one realizes one's vision is
constantly confabulating to make for vision's imperfections. And so-forth.

So there's no reason no to expect that our experience and memory of
consciousness isn't a incomplete reflection of what's actually happening.

Lots of people strongly believe they have a soul. That's clearly anti-
materialist and has no basis in reality but it seems like a quite natural
illusion (one that the "hard problem" ideology resembles). The "subjective
experience exists" statement, if it's taken to mean a single, uniform fabric
of experience exists, seems unjustified given the overall messiness I
mentioned and if the hard-problem claim isn't this, what is it?

~~~
incadenza
I'd take your argument further even. We could be mistaken about every
experience we've ever had. Let's take the brain in a vat example, in which
none of our sensory experiences accurately model reality.

This has no bearing on the hard problem of describing consciousness or how
organic material (maybe silicon some day) gives rise to it. It also doesn't
indicate how a physicalist picture of the mind could, in principle, capture
the phenomena.

~~~
rosser
You can be mistaken about the content of your experience, but I can not
conceive you you can be mistaken about _the fact you 're having one_.

Dream, delusion, reality, drugs, schizophrenia, completely fabricated sensory
manifold, whatever; the content _does not matter_ for purposes of this
question. Is that brain in a jar experiencing something? Is it _experiencing
at all_?

That's consciousness.

~~~
kovrik
But wouldn't it mean that literally all living beings have consciousness? That
consciousness is not a binary thing, but there are many levels of
consciousness.

Humans always liked egocentric views -- "The Earth is the center of the
Universe". Or another version: "Humans are superior because they have
consciousness".

If there are many levels of consciousness, one may imagine some
extraterrestrial super intelligent beings that are many levels above humans,
that would think of humans as non-consciousness beings -- like we think of
many animals.

Now, if we go down instead, we can say that all animals with brain are
conscious (just as not as we are), can't we?

~~~
rosser
Yes, it does.

In fact, I submit that it's the duty of anyone saying that the line separating
"conscious" and "not-conscious" animals is _here_ or _there_ has to justify
not just why that's where they drew the line, but _that there is one in the
first place._

------
remir
I always found fascinating how, given enough time, organic matter evolved to
the point where it became aware of itself, created mental forms to communicate
with itself (language), named and categorized itself (human beings, plants,
animals, rocks, etc) to try to understand itself.

The water that I drink has been inside countless beings for eons. My body is
composed of elements that have been on this planet for eons. I think I'm
separate from the rest of the planet, of the system, but am I, really?

I am like a VM inside an hypervisor. I think I'm separate from the whole, but
that's only an illusion.

Our senses are powerful and allow us to navigate the world, but if we train
ourselves to go beyond them, beyond the language we collectively created,
beyond even our memories and thoughts/feelings associated with them, what will
we find? Perhaps consciousness is something that should be studied
individually?

------
tim333
I seems to me the way forward to understand consciousness scientifically is
making computer simulation of parts of conscious awareness and comparing with
how it works in real brains until the results are similar. "What I cannot
create, I do not understand" as Feynman had on his blackboard.
[https://www.quora.com/What-did-Richard-Feynman-mean-when-
he-...](https://www.quora.com/What-did-Richard-Feynman-mean-when-he-said-What-
I-cannot-create-I-do-not-understand)

Neural scene representation and rendering (deepmind.com)
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17313937](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17313937)

seems a step in that direction.

~~~
rixed
> What I cannot create, I do not understand

Does not imply that you necessarily understand what you can create.

In this instance, I feel creating something that behaves like a normal brain
would not straightforwardly lead to an understanding. In the contrary, it may
left us with more questions than answers.

~~~
ythn
> In this instance, I feel creating something that behaves like a normal brain
> would not straightforwardly lead to an understanding. In the contrary, it
> may left us with more questions than answers.

Depends on what level of abstraction you create it.

Two examples:

1\. a person creates a complex video game using assembly language (Roller
Coaster Tycoon). It can probably be said this person understands very
intimately how every aspect of his game works at every level of the computer.

2\. a person creates a complex video game using <Unity, Unreal, etc.>. It can
probably be said that the person understands how their game works at a high
level, but lower levels (memory, OS, graphics) are still magic to that person.

~~~
kolpa
#1 certainly not. Chaotic systems (such as the game of life) are easy to build
from scratch, but very hard to understand. Reduction is not understanding.

------
stillsut
A good start towards defining consciousness is to box it in with edge cases: a
person in coma? a severely mentally retarded person? a person on
hallucinogenic drugs? a dog? The answers to these edge cases can help us
separate possibly entangled concepts that seem to come under the umbrella of
consciousness.

I would concentrate on collecting empirical evidence, at the expense of
developing further theoretical speculation along the lines of "p-zombies". I
could see a Darwin-like figure traveling widely and recording detail minutely,
and using it to make the case for simple unifying force behind an enormous
spectrum of variation.

------
wu-ikkyu
If controlling and isolating variables is crucial to objective science, and
using our own consciousness is a requirement to test/observe consciousness, is
it even possible for us to objectively test consciousness?

------
syphilis2
Is there a simple explanation for why consciousness (as an idea, or something
distinct from unconsciousness) is necessary?

I think my wording was poor. I don't mean necessary for things that may
exhibit consciousness. I mean why should consciousness even be considered to
exist? Why is it a necessary complication to understanding the mind?

~~~
hackinthebochs
Does the idea of consciousness have any explanatory power? Does it pick out
something substantively different than unconscious processes? If we were to
replace all talk about consciousness with talk about molecules swirling about,
would we lose something? I think the answer to these questions is yes. It
seems that consciousness is a necessary feature of a complete explanation of
the world in the same way trees and tables are. That is, even if these things
can be reduced to more fundamental things, talk of tress and tables, and
consciousness is still important.

~~~
AstralStorm
You could probably use few more specific words to a greater effect. Such as
self-model, world model, memory, information processing, directed action,
responsiveness. Consciousness is a bit too underdefined a word. It is probably
not as much of a whole as a tree or human as an organism is - it is not even
persistent nor stable - and leaves no persistent traces in the world.

You don't get a consciousness carcass left behind or a "monad" as some current
theorists postulated. At least we haven't found any.

~~~
hackinthebochs
But consciousness picks out something different from self-model, world model,
information processing, etc. That is to say, none of these things sufficiently
describes the processes we refer to when we talk about consciousness. A
replacement concept would need to capture everything real about the term. We
can replace water with H2O in any context and it makes sense. But there are
contexts where we can meaningfully speak of consciousness where self-model
(apparently) doesn't completely fit, e.g. "the pain of my stubbed toe
overwhelmed my conscious experience".

~~~
AstralStorm
Replace by "overrode my decision capability" (meaning you cannot act beyond
reflex) or "overran my symbolic capability" (it was so big you cannot describe
it) or perhaps overrode your other senses (couldn't sense anything else
physically) or perhaps "stopped your self model from updating" (blocked
integration of other perceptions).

Better? Definitely less poetic but perhaps more accurate.

------
planck01
A pet hypothesis of mine: I think consciousness comes from our evolved brain
capability to simulate and predict the behavior of others for the purpose of
recognizing if we are conned. Consiousness then is being able to apply this
capability to ourselves.

------
fsiefken
Check the ideas of Bernardo Kastrup. [https://bigthink.com/robby-berman/are-
we-all-multiple-person...](https://bigthink.com/robby-berman/are-we-all-
multiple-personalities-of-universal-consciousness)

[https://www.bernardokastrup.com/p/papers.html](https://www.bernardokastrup.com/p/papers.html)

------
laurex
I recently read Bruce Hood's The Self Illusion: How the Social Brain Creates
Identity. I think there are some interesting ideas there and in Matthew
Lieberman's Social: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Connect about the evolutionary
value of consciousness that are a bit of a different take, in that
consciousness's advantage might be seen as an improvement to collaboration and
that identity is more of a means to that end than an end in itself.

------
anon1253
2011 "Explicit memory as a framework for the neural correlate of
consciousness"
[https://www.dropbox.com/s/huol1vf4j1fs1ll/mind_matters.pdf?d...](https://www.dropbox.com/s/huol1vf4j1fs1ll/mind_matters.pdf?dl=0)

------
modzu
the many problems in the study of consciousness are well documented (hence why
this thread begins with "toward a...") -- so of course it must be studied in
an interdisciplinary manner (what cognitive science attempts to do). can
somebody more familiar with this work in particular explain what it
contributes, or summarize the idea behind MICS for us?

------
bra-ket
too philosophical, how about figuring out first how we identify objects, parse
sentences or recall things from memory before talking about consciousness

~~~
Reactionary_
There is a functional and descriptive science of the apparatus of our
consciousness, i.e. the things you describe.

There is also the profound mystery of how individually 'unconscious' physical
constituents of our nervous system can give rise to our conscious experience
of the world.

The domain of the first is neuroscience and will yield its mysteries to us in
time.

As for the Hard Problem of Consciousness as I've described it above, I have
resigned myself to the belief that we will never be able to peel back that
fundamental mystery. One could (and many have) write volumes on why this is
the case, but I believe the simplest explanation of why the Hard Problem is
Hard is that we are unable to even state the nature of the problem in a
satisfactory way. Our language (our comprehension) fails when we try to probe
at the root of consciousness.

~~~
naasking
> One could (and many have) write volumes on why this is the case, but I
> believe the simplest explanation of why the Hard Problem is Hard is that we
> are unable to even state the nature of the problem in a satisfactory way.

Or the nature of our perceptions simply fools us into thinking there's
actually a problem to solve.

~~~
JackFr
Or our brains are tricking us into believing that they are universal knowing
machines -- that is anything we cannot know cannot be, and anything that is we
are capable of knowing.

~~~
AstralStorm
Interesting figure of speech "our brains". Did you employ some other reasoning
tool formulating that sentence? (Yes you did, quite a few. Those tools were
designed using the brain too.)

~~~
JackFr
I don't follow -- but I'm curious what you mean?

------
haskellandchill
Haha eventually with all this theory they will just declare "this is what
consciousness is!" and tell all of us that our experiences of consciousness
are invalid. Most likely we will sit down and take it, like ok, you win
scientists. Then we will be replaced by dumb but efficient robots. Yay.

~~~
naasking
Kind of like they declared "this is what life is", and they were probably
right to do so. Vitalism and dualistic theories of consciousness both belong
in the dustbin of history.

~~~
haskellandchill
I belong in the dustbin of history, we're hanging out in the dustbin and I'm
throwing a party. Everyone can come wrestle in the mud.

~~~
lifthearth
I wonder sometimes if scientists will solve consciousness and realize that we
should have just been partying and having fun with each other the whole time.

~~~
financialsub
We picked capitalism, it was a choice, and it says some people get to party
sometimes, but not all of the time, unless they did a really good job once.

------
AndrewKemendo
Our medical ethics prevents us from directly studying consciousness in a way
that would give us strong casual explanation. I'm unsure if we'd ever allow it
actually.

We might get around the edges, but until you can show you can directly turn
consciousness off (and back on again probably) in vivo, in the same way we try
to do with every other "effective" medical treatment, the strength of any
proof is going to be inconclusive.

The closest we'll probably get is eventually creating some system which
convincingly displays the characteristics that humans recognize as
"Consciousness." Hopefully we can stop talking about it then.

~~~
lisper
> until you can show you can directly turn consciousness off (and back on
> again

But we can, and we do -- every day. That's exactly what general anesthetics
do. It's also what happens during sleep.

~~~
haskellandchill
Hm really? Try more drugs, like ketamine. Dissociatives in general will give
you an interesting perspective on these issues. Personally, I feel conscious
in my dreams while sleeping. Also there are gradations of sleep state, such as
the one where you don't get high quality sleep because you partially monitor
your scary environment.

~~~
sewercake
Evan Thompson explores these ideas further in his book 'Waking, Dreaming,
Being' if you're so keen. A brilliant guy, who successfully integrates
information from various cognitive disciplines, though he can be dry at times.

