
Consciousness is worth thinking about - ca98am79
http://hack.ly/articles/why-consciousness-may-not-come-from-the-brain/
======
gizmo
To put it kindly, I'd say this is sophomoric philosophy.

The OP suggests that "a more simple and elegant resolution to this paradox is
that there is simply one consciousness, and that it alone observes (possibly,
decides) these quantum states.".

This raises obvious the question: where does _that_ consciousness come from?
The author makes no attempt to address that problem. The answer he gives "the
UNIVERSE is like ALL consciousness, man" doesn't really have substance.

There is other crackpottery, such as the claim that the material world is
_created by_ consciousness. This is unscientific (and lousy philosophy)
because it's a philosophy that explains something without giving us any
insight or deeper understanding.

The suggestion that "consciousness _is_ the present moment" is also confused.
Brains experience the present moment together because the present moment is
part of the _state_ of the individual brains. If two brains don't share _any_
common input then they don't share the present moment either. Or to put it in
a different way, we wouldn't share the present moment in a meaningful way
either with a brain that lives in the same world as us but runs 1000x faster
or 1000x slower.

I could pick this apart further, but I don't see the point. This article
really isn't up to HN quality standards.

~~~
wellpast
I've discussed this topic of consciousness with others and there is a common
visceral reaction (like the one in this comment) that is common when
challenging the presumed location of consciousness, especially from
programmers, and I'm curious why.

One thought I've had is that programmers (given our profession) tend to
fetishize the idea that ultimately we will understand the brain well enough to
recreate consciousness in machine and code. It's pretty exciting to believe
that as a programmer; much like it was probably exciting to think that we were
at the center of a Ptolemaic universe.

I'm okay with someone wanting to ask whether the world is really flat, even if
he doesn't address what other shape it could be. I found this article to be a
very interesting questioning about some assumptions we have regarding
consciousness.

~~~
dvanduzer
I think most of the "argument" comes from the conflation of the "what is it
like" with "where does it live" questions.[0]

Most of the "dumb" arguments about "where does it live" are actually "what is
it like" questions, most of which are thoroughly disposed of in Dennett's
Quining Qualia.[1]

[0]
[http://lesswrong.com/lw/no/how_an_algorithm_feels_from_insid...](http://lesswrong.com/lw/no/how_an_algorithm_feels_from_inside/)

[1]
[http://ase.tufts.edu/cogstud/papers/quinqual.htm](http://ase.tufts.edu/cogstud/papers/quinqual.htm)

------
dtf
I remember an aside in a neuroscience textbook which asked if, one day, a
mystery like "where consciousness comes from" might seem as oddly posed as
"where life comes from". Once you've broken "life" into its biological and
chemical components - cells, proteins, chemical reactions - incredibly complex
as they all are, the notion of "life", or of some kind of essential "life
force" just kind of disintegrates. Once you get down to that microscopic
level, the illusion breaks down.

~~~
DennisP
But with life, everything is physically observable. How you would observe
conscious experience in something other than yourself? I don't mean the
behaviors associated with consciousness, but conscious awareness itself?

People do a lot of handwaving around this issue and claim we've got it cracked
just because we sorta know how the brain works, and yet we don't have a way
even to detect whether this thing we're talking about exists. Much less do we
know how it works, or how it's created. Our supposed scientific explanations
are just a lot of mumbo jumbo when we can't even measure the thing we're
talking about. We can detect brain activity, but we're just assuming that's
the same thing.

I think ultimately this will be resolved experimentally, but we're a long way
from accomplishing that.

~~~
siddboots
I think the point is that we perhaps should not expect to find a particular
mechanism for consciousness, any more than we should expect to find a life-
force.

It could be that the "feeling" of consciousness is just something that comes
from being a massively-parallel, unsupervised learning machine.

------
simonster
Whether David Chalmers believes that consciousness doesn't come from the brain
depends on what you mean by "comes from." He believes that physics can
completely describe the physical world; he does not believe in souls and
interactionist/Cartesian dualism. Instead, he suggests that information may
have both physical and mental manifestations.

While I once found this line of reasoning convincing, I'm no longer so sure it
matters. While consciousness itself may be non-physical, under the assumption
that physical effects have only physical causes, we should be able to explain
why we say we are conscious in physical terms. I'm not sure that an
explanation of the latter will also explain the former, but in the end, I
don't think we will care. I think we will find that the everyday concept of
"consciousness" mixes together many different ideas, each of which are simpler
to solve on their own than they are when we consider them together.

Roughly a century ago we went through a similar process with the concept of
life. People wanted to know what makes a thing alive, and many intelligent
scientists were drawn to the idea that there is something innate to a living
organism that makes it alive. After decades of biological research, we're
still not sure what makes an organism alive, in the sense that the line
between living organisms and inert biological material is not well-defined,
but we know how living organisms reproduce and grow, and that's really what
matters.

~~~
dgallagher
_After decades of biological research, we 're still not sure what makes an
organism alive, in the sense that the line between living organisms and inert
biological material is not well-defined, but we know how living organisms
reproduce and grow, and that's really what matters._

It might be as simple as "it's alive while it's a functioning machine." A
disassembled car is just parts and can't drive/be-alive, but assembled it is a
car and can drive/be-alive.

~~~
Tichy
I've come to the conclusion that it is yet another useless question. Or
perhaps "it's alive if it interests us". Is the great red spot on Jupiter
alive? I don't know, but who cares if it is interesting enough to study?
Imagine we finally manage to land on an alien planet, and all we find is
robots "living" there. Would we go "ah, too bad, we didn't find life"?

~~~
dgallagher
I don't think the question is useless, but rather very difficult to answer. We
simply don't know enough yet to answer it, but might someday.

As for alien life, I expect if there's anything out there, it's probably
intelligent, redundant, and efficient. Who knows what form that could take? It
might be robots, or computers, a mesh network, or something else entirely.
Whatever form it takes, it'll be limited by the constraints of the universe
(or multiverse, or whatever "reality" is).

A lot of people's ideas about aliens are molded from television and movies.
Historically we've had humans playing those characters, severely limiting how
"alien" they can be. While very inspirational and valuable, it has the
negative of potentially pigeon-holing peoples minds.

~~~
Tichy
The interesting question in my opinion is, why do we find something
interesting. For example if we hope to find alien life, what do we hope to
find? That is the real question, not some arbitrary definition of life.

------
gtr32x
I am writing this in part directly to gizmo but also to the rest of the HN
readers. First of all, I didn't think it was necessary to call this
'crackpottery'. Coming entirely from a scientific perspective one could write
this off as completely philosophical and almost non-sensical. I would like to
say that I've definitely gained some new insights or nearly a moment of eureka
from reading certain words of the article.

Of course, I can't describe exactly what is it that I've felt. But I can sort
of provide the environment into which I've felt that feeling to try to find
that common denominator which may exist in all of us.

I've been a big fan of Buddism, I can't say I'm a Buddist but I definitely try
to take elements from Buddism that I concur with to better define my own
experience with the world. Buddism has a notion which is identically described
by the author - observation of the world without egos. Buddism suggests that
being able to achieve this allows inner zen. I'm here not to advocate nor
prove anything related to Buddism, I just want to use it for a setup leading
to where I am at.

Through schooling an education, one thing we've learned is to be objective,
and unbiased. This means innocent until proven guilty; do not accept any
claims without facts; discounting scientific discoveries without proofs etc.
That is, we come to be capable of being objective with things that do not
'directly' connect with our consciousness. Now, entering the consciousness,
can we still be objective? Can we observe our own failures just like how we
observe the failures of others without emotional attachment? Can we connect to
what others say to comfort us when we experience a rejection, a breakup? Can
we understand that the past cannot be adjusted and therefore NEVER experience
the feeling of regret and ONLY gain experience of what could be done better
next time if the same were to happen? In general, can we completely deattach
ourselves from our emotions and just observe the entities, whether it be you,
him, or I, it's all the same.

I can't speak for others, but for a brief moment while reading the article,
I've felt a weird out-of-place sensation where I'm just a being, and I am not
I. It's almost as if disconnecting my consciousness with my body, it's almost
scary.

Just food for thoughts.

------
DennisP
I think ultimately this will be resolved by experiment.

If progress continues far enough, then eventually people will want to upload
their minds to computers, probably using Moravec's method of gradually
replacing neurons with hardware.

The prudent way to do this would be to ask the person how it's going as you
progress, and try it in various different sequences.

So if, say, you replace the visual cortex, and the person reports that their
perception of color and depth has disappeared, but they still know where
things are, then you know that the new hardware is correctly reporting
information, but for some reason isn't supporting conscious perception of that
information.

And then you can try to debug it. Maybe your algorithms are wrong, or maybe
consciousness requires some physical effect.

------
mistercow
It's certainly worth thinking about longer than the author has. I don't want
to be mean, but the part about QM, in particular, was just infuriating.

I wish we could send out a memo to the world that says "Please do not draw
metaphysical conclusions from mathematics or science unless you are an expert
on the field you are drawing conclusions from."

~~~
vixen99
I'd tear up the memo. Ignore, demolish or be persuaded by a conclusion by all
means but don't define who may or may not contribute it on the basis of a
fitness-to-participate filter.

~~~
mistercow
I didn't say anything about prohibition. I said I want to send a memo
_requesting_ that people not do that. It's for their own dignity as much as
anything. Please don't try to make this a "freedom of speech" thing. It's not.

But it's silly to try to generalize to philosophy from science and math that
you have only a superficial grasp of. It can be a good way to look deep to
people who are similarly ignorant (see Deepak Chopra), I suppose, but it's not
a good way to find the truth.

------
guard-of-terra
Imagine having consciousness having an evolutionary advantage. Imagine the
possibility for a complex neural network to "bind" a part of external
consciousness to itself. Then you have external but brain-trapped
consciousness as an evolutionary possibility.

How to prove: First step is to find some creature with nerves but provably
lacking consciousness.

~~~
lutusp
> Imagine having consciousness having an evolutionary advantage.

Because consciousness exists among apparently successful species, it's a
reasonable working hypothesis that it has survival value. In evolutionary
studies, the burden of evidence is properly borne by those who would argue
that an existing, seemingly adaptive trait _doesn 't_ have survival value.

> First step is to find some creature with nerves but provably lacking
> consciousness.

As to "provably", that can't be done. To prove a lack of consciousness, we
would first have to create an objective positive test for consciousness. To do
that, we would have to fully define and objectively quantify consciousness.
We're nowhere near that stage.

~~~
guard-of-terra
We can try to figure out how to create consciousness in something that didn't
have it or remove consciousness from some living being, but we can't prove
that we have a success before we understand what consciousness is.

By the way, if we were find why consciousness has evolutionary advantage we'll
have a subset of what consciousness is. A set of traits for which we can test.

~~~
lutusp
> By the way, if we were find why consciousness has evolutionary advantage
> we'll have a subset of what consciousness is.

Not necessarily. There are plenty of fitness adaptations we can crudely
quantify (group A had adaptation X and was more successful as a result) but
can't explain (in a rigorous, falsifiable way). The reason is that nature
(natural selection) is "smarter" than we are.

Also, the Turing test -- the idea that a sufficiently advanced computer
program might pass as human if accessed at a text-only terminal -- tells us
that our idea about what counts as a conscious being is pretty limited.

> A set of traits for which we can test.

If we chose a set of traits that we thought identified a conscious person, we
could just submit the set to a computer for blind simulation. My point is that
consciousness is more complicated than simple behavior, however complex.

It is said that elephants pass the mirror test, meaning when they look in a
mirror, they apparently realize they are the source of the reflection. This
test has come to be a crude measure of consciousness and self-awareness. But I
could easily program a robot to imitate the external behavior, without any
real sense of what it was doing, or anything resembling consciousness.

Consciousness is more complex, and more subtle, than most people realize, and
we really haven't even begun sorting it out.

~~~
algopats
elephant have been seeing their reflection when drinking water in lakes/ponds
for millenia. Their brains evolved to identify with those patterns. Mirror
test just proves if any species evolved enough to identify with that
"pattern".

humans are just animals. nothing special. their consciousness is no different
than say a crows or fox(cunning) consciousness. I would say one thing
though....human brain is probably one of fluidest/flexible/organs ever created
by nature. Take two humans...put one human in jail from birth (dont even teach
language), and put other human in silicon-valley from birth, send him to
stanford. Now, compare the "consciousness" of these two. Or even better, put
the former human in jungle with monkeys from birth (dont teach him anything).
I am sure there is lot of existing R&D/scientific articles on this.

~~~
lutusp
> elephant have been seeing their reflection when drinking water in
> lakes/ponds for millenia. Their brains evolved to identify with those
> patterns. Mirror test just proves if any species evolved enough to identify
> with that "pattern".

Yes, but many animals see their reflections in watering holes -- only a few of
them understand that they're seeing their own reflection.

> humans are just animals. nothing special.

That's certainly true.

> Take two humans...put one human in jail from birth (dont even teach
> language), and put other human in silicon-valley from birth, send him to
> stanford. Now, compare the "consciousness" of these two.

This diminishes the role of inheritance, but over time research, especially
twin studies, has produced increasing support for the idea that we're much
more shaped by inheritance than environment.

~~~
algopats
> Yes, but many animals see their reflections in watering holes -- only a few
> of them understand that they're seeing their own reflection.

its the nature doing its thing. only few animals/species develop certain
faculties. And humans just happen to develop "mind" faculty. I wouldn't be
surprised if some other species on a different planet developed telepathy or
some other advanced faculties.

> This diminishes the role of inheritance, but over time research, especially
> twin studies, has produced increasing support for the idea that we're much
> more shaped by inheritance than environment.

inheritance only gives you latent abilities ... They will not flower if there
is no proper environment for them to be actualized. everything is just
manifestation of the nature. we are all just different "expressions" of the
ultimate (aka "god" in some religinos)

------
Tichy
Consciousness is just an illusion. It is not a useful concept either. It won't
help you to program robots, for example.

I was very surprised to learn that according to Less Wrong, the concept of
"Zombies" is accepted by a lot of researchers of consciousness:
[http://lesswrong.com/lw/p7/zombies_zombies/](http://lesswrong.com/lw/p7/zombies_zombies/)
A zombie here is defined as a person that is exactly like a conscious person,
down to every atom, but is not conscious. I think that is complete nonsense.

~~~
mistercow
The problem I have with saying "consciousness is an illusion" is sort of
similar to saying "God was the first cause". It pushes the question one layer
away, because then the next obvious question is "an illusion to what,
exactly?" How do you produce the illusion of qualia to something that does not
experience qualia?

~~~
Tichy
It rather seems to me talking about "qualia" is pushing the question one step
away, or creating a circular argument.

If I attach a light sensor to my Arduino and then upload code to the arduino
that says "if sensor active, flash light", I'd say the arduino has a "qualia"
of light. Perceiving light flips some bit in the arduino. That's all there is
to it.

~~~
mistercow
Except that non-sensory experiences also produce qualia, and some drugs
produce qualia that are never triggered in ordinary experience. The question
of whether qualia are real is still very much the subject of debate, and not
something you can easily just wave away like that.

~~~
Tichy
I don't see the difficulty with that? If I read Wikipedia right qualia
basically just means "subjective impressions"? Alright then, compute around
for a while on your Arduino, and you get some subjective impressions. For
example you could run some simulation that is known to exhibit randomness
(like some cellular automatons) and then just pick some state of that.

I think this just boils down to the old and tired argument that "computers can
only do what humans told them to do, therefore they can't be conscious", which
is just misinformed. If I tell the computer car to turn left every time it
sees a duck, I will have no idea where it will end up.

Also building a "drug me" button into an Arduino seems trivial. You could XOR
all your data if the button is pressed, or do whatever else you fancy (even
trigger a completely different program). I don't find drug experiences
puzzling at all. If you want, overclock the Arduino so that it produces some
computing errors. Hey presto, your Arduino has a drug experience.

~~~
mistercow
The question is not whether computers can have qualia, the question is whether
qualia are real. The argument goes that if your Arduino is doing the kind of
"computing around" necessary to have subjective impressions, then it _is_
experiencing qualia, and it _is_ in some sense conscious (although not, of
course, if philosophical zombies are possible).

~~~
Tichy
Well then qualia is just an artificial definition for something that separates
me from you. Since they can't be measured I can always claim "you have no
qualia" and treat you like a machine.

~~~
mistercow
I see no reason to assume that qualia cannot be measured, in principle.

------
mytummyhertz
[http://xkcd.com/1240/](http://xkcd.com/1240/)

that is all

------
mark_l_watson
Years ago I had a good talk with David Chalmers at a Quantum Mechanics and
Consciousness conference. That prompted me to read his book. Roger Penrose and
others also have interesting ideas of what is really consciousness.

Most people probably never experience expansive meditation, but for those of
us who do that seems like further evidence that consciousness is not all in
our physical brains.

~~~
jng
Frankly, Penrose's thesis that consciousness stems from the quantum effects in
microtubules, and the pseudo-"proof" based on a scammy reductio-ad-absurdum
showing that consciousness can not be a computable function, are one of the
biggest piles of horsesh*t in this whole field. I'm amazing he hasn't lost all
credibility from such kind of deceitful thinking.

~~~
siddboots
Penrose has credibility because of his numerous other achievements. His views
on philosophy of mind are not regarded as serious positions in academic
philosophy, neuroscience, or physics.

------
shuaib
I regularly have a discussion with friends on "consciousness". And a question
that regularly comes under discussion is following:

Suppose we are living in a time when medicine has advanced tons. In this time,
a friend of yours gets into an accident, and gradually starts to lose
different body functions/parts. Each time a body part stops working, it is
replaced with an artificial one. There comes a time when everything physical
about your friend is replaced, even his brain. Though during brain change (say
brain is replaced with a chip), all his memories are shifted from his old
brain to the replacement. When this physically totally new friend of yours
wakes up after the memory transfer, he claims he is your friend, and can
answer any question you throw at him, that would have been answered by your
original friend.

Is this physically new friend actually your old friend? Or is he faking it
having access to all the memories of your friend? Did a "consciousness
transfer" occur as well? Or not?

Any take?

~~~
algopats
when you look at consciousness very thoroughly, you will realize (as did by
buddha, and several advanced advaita masters) that there is no "you" "me" "my
conciousness" etc.etc. "You" are "everything" == meaning its all in your head.
"You" are just a particular manifestation of nature will certain
variables/parameters/context/scope. If/When all those ingredients are
replicated ...it will be you. The physical body is just a host. "You" are
"compute context" operating inside the host. You call it "consciousness" or
"my consciousness". You can refer to advanced buddhist or advaita masters, who
realized this in nirvana.

Nature is doing its thing. "You" are just one particular manifestation of it,
doing its thing (aka "living life"). To end "self" suffering (the core
teaching of buddhism) you need to see this, realize this - you are guranteed
to see it, as you "it" yourself. And buddha has a program for you. As does
several other masters/"paths".

------
brandonhsiao
I've wondered about this since I was twelve, though I didn't what it was at
the time. My personal experiences have led me to conclude that it is actually
impossible for consciousness to be biological.

If you look at consciousness from a third-party perspective, it makes sense
for consciousness to be biological. Suppose we have a human named Bob; Bob
thinks with his brain, and it's a safe bet to assume his brain also creates
his consciousness. But now think about your _own_ consciousness. If it's your
brain that creates consciousness, why are you in the first-person point of
view? Why _is_ there a first-person point of view? Why are "you" not just a
brain with its own consciousness? Where do "you" come into the picture?

On a somewhat related note, the only safe bet is to assume you're the only
person in the world. You know you exist because you think and therefore are.
You don't know, however, if anyone else does.

------
caycep
There may have been a TL;DR part of this I'm missing, but it's hard to argue
against a thalamic or brainstem stroke wiping out consciousness...

------
duncancarroll
My somewhat frustrated response to this comment thread.
[http://duncancarroll.tumblr.com/post/57994245946/no-
really-c...](http://duncancarroll.tumblr.com/post/57994245946/no-really-
consciousness-is-worth-thinking-about)

------
colinm
What's the big deal about consciousness anyway??

I don't see the 'magic' about being self-aware. Surely it just a step up the
cognitive ladder from existing without awareness.

~~~
guard-of-terra
What is "cognitive ladder"? Where does it come from? How many steps does it
have? Are we the last one?

~~~
colinm
Probably an evolved gradation.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirror_test#Reactions_of_other_...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirror_test#Reactions_of_other_animals_to_mirrors)

~~~
guard-of-terra
I can imagine a race of aliens rejecting human consciousness on the basis of
them not passing Smell Mirror Test.

Let's suppose dogs will qualify which will humiliatingly put humans pretty low
on the ladder.

------
capex
I wrote an article [1] on the topic of considering your brain 'the significant
other'. On a personal level, I think there are significant productivity
advantages to be had if you consider your brain as not your 'self'. [1]
[http://humbleware.com/the-runaway-brain/](http://humbleware.com/the-runaway-
brain/)

------
e3pi
Here on HN we've seen some sort of quasicrystal fabric distributing the prime
integers and providing a possible entry onto gaining headway proving the
Riemann Hypothesis:

HN search:

[http://golem.ph.utexas.edu/category/2013/06/quasicrystals_an...](http://golem.ph.utexas.edu/category/2013/06/quasicrystals_and_the_riemann.html)

[http://fadereu.posterous.com/knk103-the-crystals-of-mt-
zeta](http://fadereu.posterous.com/knk103-the-crystals-of-mt-zeta)

So OP ca98am79's suggestion of a common consciousness we -as I vaguely
understand it - be as transceivers(?) of/with(?) merits some similar
consideration, for those still cycling among these perennial questions.

Rowing to City Dock everyday, a recurring observation of complex wave crest
interference's semi-chaotic patterns with discrete natural nos sub-wave-train
symmetric `beats', share the same medium of all semi-uniform distributed
diversely scaled and chaotically asynchronous impulse sources afloat upon all
of Eagle Harbor and beyond.

Thank you ca98am79 to boldly post here.

------
ca98am79
see also:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6196334](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6196334)

