
Consciousness: The last 50 years (and the next) - laurex
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/2398212818816019
======
AareyBaba
The author's talk at the Royal Institute is here
[https://youtu.be/xRel1JKOEbI?t=2817](https://youtu.be/xRel1JKOEbI?t=2817)

Overall, I'd say we are no closer to understanding consciousness than we were
30 years ago. As a science, we are still poking at the brain to gather data
and proposing hand-wavy models of low level behavior. As philosophy, we still
don't agree on what the phenomenon we need to study is.

My gut feeling is that consciousness/intelligence is an emergent phenomenon of
the physical brain (a very high-dimensional non-linear system not amenable to
reductionism) and that the simplest model of the brain will be too complex for
our brains to understand.

~~~
Erlich_Bachman
To be fair, the simplest model of a complete modern automobile is already too
complex for a human to understand. (Except for the 10 geniuses perhaps.) Not a
model of just the engine, or just the chemistry processes in the exhaust
system, or just the electrical wiring, or how the painting jobs work - but the
whole model of every subsystem existent in this car.

Notably, this does not stop us from making new cars.

There would need to be some substantial basis for a claim that a human brain
will not soon be a similar deal: no one will undertand the whole system
completely, but we will have experts on different areas and aspects of
consciousness which will be more than enough for progress and specifically,
strong AI.

~~~
Engineering-MD
I would suggest that the difference is modularity. Designed devices often are
made modular to aid understanding and ease modification/repair. The opposite
is true with evolved systems. The brain is ultimately produced and controlled
by genetics, which allows genes to overlap, and have multiple functions. This
makes understanding it difficult. Furthermore, the highly interconnected
nature of the brain will make this even less modular. While I think we will
gain further understanding of some sub systems such as the cerebellum or
visual cortex, I think the unmodular nature will limit this to imperfect
models.

~~~
Erlich_Bachman
One of the most profound understandings I had about nature and humans - is
that it is also modular!

Surely, it is likely evolved and not directly designed, but if you look at it
more closely - it is modular in almost every important area! Organisms
oragnize into distinct non-mixable speices/genotypes, we have organs in our
body that have specific functions, we have sub-organs, we have specialized
distinct types of cells, distinct sub-cellular structures inside the cell,
distinct proteins with different functionalities (with some groupings of
course), even higher level functionality is modular, like for example
sleeping: all processes that need to be done offline are refactored away into
a "sleep" phase which is enforced in many ways, even though this enforcement
turned out to have so many parts and being so complicated that newborns need
to learn to to start sleeping. The sleep itself it split into distinct phases,
different processes happening in the them; humans auto-organize their
societies into specific roles, etc.

And, my personal favorite - the bulk of the information about a human is in a
genome: a specified code utilizing 3-letter, 4-character words and sentences
to describe almost everything needed to make a human. How did it evolve into a
"code", a language??? Modern designed x86 architecture is more complex and has
more ugly legacy crap than the evolved genetic code which has the perfect
number of letters, perfect control structures, perfect number of aminoacids
that is enough to build everything! (Ok, yes I know it is not "perfect" but it
is very very sophisticated and, apparently, well-thought-through.)

So I think this modularity, which exists both in evolved and designed systems
tells about the nature of the universe, and/or complexity, information and
knowledge: the information and its physical representation conspires to become
modular and produce more complex designs and entities that way, through
abstraction, through logical levels and modular architecture. Not only through
sheer number of interconnections (surely, there is enough of that too, but is
it really that much different to a number of transistors in a recent x86
chip?), but through modularity.

It is easy to miss this because nature is arguably "less" modular than a man-
made car. But when looking at some design choices under the hood or talking to
mechanics, or looking at leaked software code for big projects - there is just
enough spaghetti code there to prove that such designed entities have a lot of
ugly poorly understood interconnectivity that is just made to "work good
enough". I guess it is when this horizontal complexity becomes unsustainable -
the designer, be it a human or a natural process of evolution - has to come up
a new abstraction level, an organ, a genetic language - to allow for further
progress.

------
ivan_ah
For anyone interested in consciousness, I highly recommend this blog:
[https://www.consciousentities.com/](https://www.consciousentities.com/)

The author (Peter Hankins) does an excellent job of summarizing and critiquing
current research papers in philosophy and neuroscience, and the comments on
the articles are often very informative.

Can we the mystery of human consciousness in the 21st century? Ok, ok, maybe
we should start with a definitions...

~~~
trevyn
I'm starting to think that there's not much mystery left to consciousness,
it's just that most people are _really_ uncomfortable with the idea that "we"
are just the complex interactions of electrical impulses and meat.

Or, perhaps, the implications of that.

~~~
curo
The scientific method was designed to study phenomenon and test observations
empirically. There's an essential problem with using science to confirm or
describe that in which phenomenon and confirmation is presented.

If you're talking about the neural correlates of consciousness, you're right
that we're removing a lot of the mystery. But if you're talking about the
mystery that is your own subjective being, then we may never solve that
problem. As Susan Greenfield states, "we can't turn the water into wine"

Sam Harris does a great 5m summary on the hard problem of consciousness that's
worth a watch:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CiaKm6PlpsQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CiaKm6PlpsQ)

~~~
trevyn
I'm saying there is no mystery -- that people invoke mystery as an avoidance
tactic when they have cognitive dissonance about an otherwise well-established
conclusion, or when they find some pleasure in invoking the unknown and
philosophizing.

There should be nothing mysterious in 2018 about a biological being that has
an internal self-model, memory, and processes sensory stimuli and internal
neural firings over time, both of which have a direct relation to the physical
basis of that self-model. That is what self-awareness is.

"Experience can't be explained by science because science only arises in
experience" sounds profound but contributes nothing -- if you invalidate the
content of your experience, then you no longer have any reliable axioms on
which to build any argument whatsoever, and we might as well all go home.

The Sam Harris video you linked makes a good point -- that we want an
explanation of consciousness that _intuitively_ makes sense. I'm saying that
if you study enough AI and neuroscience, it _does_ intuitively make sense.

His counterexample of explaining the "brittleness of glass" is intuitively OK
with us even if we don't actually personally understand all of the details of
the molecular and atomic interactions, because _it does not fundamentally
challenge our beliefs of who we are_. If there's some explanation of
consciousness that _does_ challenge our beliefs of who we are, you better
believe you're going to need a more comprehensive and complex explanation
before you're going to intuitively believe it.

~~~
bencollier49
This isn't meant as an ad-hominem, but it still staggers me when I see
comments like this. There seems to be a class of people who are unable to see
the gaping chasm left by science in its inability to describe the reasons for
our ability to experience subjective consciousness. We would need a scientific
revolution to understand it. Neuroscience has nothing to say; physics has
little to say.

The OP article makes the point that we haven't got near to cracking the
problem.

Personally, I think we have a category issue. We simply don't know what
category to put consciousness in, and all attempts to solve it thus far have
been category mistakes.

~~~
naasking
> But if you're talking about the mystery that is your own subjective being,
> then we may never solve that problem.

For your consideration:

[https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.0050...](https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00500/full)

> Personally, I think we have a category issue. We simply don't know what
> category to put consciousness in, and all attempts to solve it thus far have
> been category mistakes.

Consider the possibility that the category you've implicitly created for
consciousness doesn't actually exist.

~~~
bencollier49
Yes, I've considered that; naturally, considering it's the fashion at the
moment. There's no reason to assume that something which people have described
for thousands of years doesn't exist, just because a bunch of people working
with a science rooted in objective measurement have found something that
they're unable to model in any way.

It'd be nice to think that consciousness wasn't real, because then science
could explain mostly everything. Very comforting. But it can't.

~~~
naasking
Do you believe in Thor too because people believed in him for thousands of
years?

And consciousness does not have the long history you describe.

And "unable to model" is a huge stretch. You can't measure something that has
no definition or understood boundaries. When the rest if our perceptual and
cognitive faculties are explained, you'll find there's nothing left for
consciousness. It's the new god of the gaps argument.

------
intralizee
I'm hopeful the doctrine of panpsychism ends up being true. I prefer the idea
of my laptop equally having a consciousness as me and in some ways it's
calming than the contrary possibility. If reality is just one deterministic
system, it's reassuring to think of the system being designed for having
universal observation and while still predetermined nothing is left out of its
role in the stories unraveled.

~~~
Erlich_Bachman
Even the most mainstream science already has big issues with the idea of
"determinism". Many people still assume that determinism is the main paradigm,
but actually it has not been for a while, with the introudction of the chaos
theory.

Chaos theory is a very challenging and interesting concept which you should
check out, but one of the most mundane outcomes of it is that there is no way
to predict the physical world. No way to see what is going to happen. Now,
obviously one could predict a simple neutonian mechanical system for a 10
second-period, or predict enough of electrical impulses in a piece of designed
silicon to make a functional processor - but in general, in the widest sense,
there is no way to predict the universe. Even with the assumption that there
is some completely determined process at the microscopic core of every
interaction - those processes, when combined into big systems, wired up with
feedback loops and put in a system so tiny that one has to had a machine 2
times bigger than the original system in the first place: and we arrive at
total unpredictability of the universe.

Note, this is not just practical unpredictability: the question is not about
us not having enough technical prowess to predict the universe. The issue is
that it is physically impossible to build any real prediction machine that
would predic the whole thing: you would need a bigger universe than the
universe it is trying to predict. It is even a logical contradiction!

Thus determinism becomes more of a philosophical outlook than an actual
physical property that could be calculated, predicted etc.

Even the word itself - "determinism". Assumnig that the fate, the outcome of
something is determined. In what way can it be determined if we know that it
is physically impossible to determine it? Not because we lack machines or
havent built a strong enough microscope. Our very own scientific paradigm, the
scientific method, the way of thinking about the universe - the thing that
lies at the core of our worldview - says that it is impossible to predict the
whole system. Absolutely impossible. So it is unpredictable - ergo
undetermined.

~~~
trevyn
And yet, we can predict certain things with surprising accuracy.

The fallacy is thinking that we must predict an exact state vs. a
probabilistic prediction of an information-theoretically meaningful set of
states. Reality is metastable, so there are certain attractor states, even if
randomness is injected throughout.

I have no idea the exact second my plane is going to land tomorrow, but I’m
reasonably confident it will land, and I’m very confident that the United
States will still exist tomorrow.

I have no idea if the United States will exist in 10,000 years, but I’m pretty
sure Earth will still be a rock orbiting the Sun at that time.

And so on.

~~~
Erlich_Bachman
I'm sorry if I didn't understand you reply, - I think you wrote is very
obvious and I though i adressed that with the simple neutonian system
reference.

Using your analogy, whether United States will exist in 10000 years might
actually be undetermined. Not just unknown, unpredicted, but undetermined in
the chaos theory- sense. Not only you don't know it - the universe itself does
not know it. And the universe is built in such a way that it is impossible to
know. Not just "very hard and requires a lot of computation". Impossible,
because we can show that the computations you would need would require a
computer bigger than the universe itself.

Then there is of course an extra note required here is that there is no way
for me as a human to know if the question about United States actually is
universally undetermined - or just unpredicted; if there is some entity that
can predict that. But the chaos theory says that many aspects of the system,
and the system as a whole is undetermined. (While having exceptions where
simple things like your plane landing can be predicted with some accuracy,
yes.)

------
hestefisk
One word: autopoiesis

