
Why can’t the world’s greatest minds solve the mystery of consciousness? - room271
http://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/jan/21/-sp-why-cant-worlds-greatest-minds-solve-mystery-consciousness
======
thoman23
I have to say that I'm shocked that some of the early comments here complete
dismiss what I consider to be the greatest and possibly most important of
mysteries we are confronted with. If not great and important, at least the
subject of who are "you" is a deeply and profoundly intimate question to
ponder.

I distinctly remember first learning some basic laws of Newtonian physics in
high school, and leaving school that day dumbfounded. If all particles behave
in a deterministic fashion, how is it that these particles bouncing around in
my head can lead to the perception of free will and agency? It was a question
that would pursue off an on for most of the rest of my life. Arriving at
college, I dove into psychology with a passion, hoping that understanding the
biomechanics of the brain would give me some clues. I turned to computer
science and was instantly drawn to AI. I read everything I could get my hands
on on the subject, with Daniel Dennett and Douglas Hofstadter being favorites
of course (I still revisit Godel Escher Bach from time to time). I even
experimented with various psychedelics looking for that elusive insight that
would explain things.

Now I'm in my 40's and of course I still don't have "the answer". I'm not as
consumed by the question anymore, focusing instead on just enjoying my days on
earth here with my family and friends.

But how on earth anyone can belittle the question of consciousness blows my
mind, so to speak. :)

~~~
deeviant
You'll have to be a bit more specific in terms of what exactly people are
saying that "belittles the question of consciousness", I haven't see anything
in this thread that I took as such.

As to your other statement, Newtonian physics was wrong. It broke down under
certain circumstances which are not (largely) encountered under daily live, so
our intuition was useless to deceive the faults in it's laws, yet this did not
stop people of the time from thinking it was the end-all-be-all set of rules
that described physical reality. Newtonian physics is certainly _not_ the
branch of physical that would help you understanding free will and agency.

Then Einstein came around, and amended (some of) Newtons problems. Then
Quantum Mechanics came around and filled in some gaps in Relativity. QM and
Relativity still don't play nice together so in the future, someone else will
most likely make further amendments and get us closer to the answer.

But anyways, what I'm getting at, is there seems to be a reaction, perhaps
innate to the human psyche to ... hmm... blow a fuse, when faced with an
problem perceived to be intellectually intractable. But progress comes,
inevitably. Sometimes slowly, and sometimes quick, but always inevitable.

My own thoughts on consciousness is that, of course its generated by the
brain, of course it is caused by things that remain solely in the realm of
physical reality. Of course (assuming we don't blow ourselves up or the like,
as this may take quite some time) we'll not only understand what's going on in
the brain, but will be able to build conscious machines, machines which we
will quickly find resemble us more closely than machines and at this point
will see that the amazing phenomenon we call consciousness is the not the sole
domain of humanity, but just the sole example(let's exclude other animals from
this thought for simplicity) of such up until that point. It might take awhile
though, evolution took a billions of years to get consciousness to this point,
I think it's only fair to give humanity a bit more time before we call it a
lost cause.

~~~
thoman23
> You'll have to be a bit more specific in terms of what exactly people are
> saying that "belittles the question of consciousness", I haven't see
> anything in this thread that I took as such.

When I first opened the comments, the first few comments I saw were:

dominotw 58 minutes ago | link[-] > i can't take anyone who uses the word
"consciousness" seriously, given noone has any idea what it actually means.

Marazan 57 minutes ago | link[-] > Predicated on the concept that the Hard
Problem of Consciousness is actually a problem.

crimsonalucard 44 minutes ago | link[-] > How can we solve a problem about a
word that isn't clearly defined?

Regarding my other comments, I focused on deterministic Newtonian physics
because that is what first sparked my interest in the question. Yes, since
that time I have learned a bit of quantum mechanics and relativity. Around the
time that I found myself trying to grasp string theory is when I gave up the
physics thread (pun intended). I'm not a physicist, and frankly I'm not smart
enough to fully grasp modern physics.

For what it's worth, I'm in the "emergent property" camp. I certainly don't
think there is anything non-physical necessary to explain consciousness. I
just think it's a fascinating topic and was shocked at the early
dismissiveness I saw. Even in the original article, there's at times an
undertone of "consciousness is an illusion and therefore not interesting".
Just because we don't need to resort to the supernatural to explain
consciousness doesn't make it less interesting. To me, that's exactly why it
is interesting.

~~~
protonfish
I think the derision is not from pondering the _actual_ question of
consciousness (or strong AI) but the nebulous, fuzzy definition of
consciousness by some in the philosophy camp. I think that better work is
being done by those focusing on well-defined problems and holding off on the
"hard" question until we are in a better position.

Also, this article is based heavily on Koch's pansychism which I find very
unconvincing. There is talk about consciousness relating somehow to mental
simulations and I believe this is where the answer lies (and an explanation
that was not included in the article.)

~~~
RivieraKid
> fuzzy definition of consciousness by some in the philosophy camp

When discussing consciousness I like to focus on the _feeling_ of pain, which
is much more clearly understood by people. So the question is, why do I feel
pain when my brain is in a certain physical state?

~~~
deeviant
I think that's pretty easy to explain. The change of state in your brain
modulates the thing that it both creates and controls (consciousness) state to
"feel" pain.

Consciousness is a emergent property of the incredible complex organ we call a
brain. At first it may seem too odd to think that something as incredibly
surreal and deep as consciousness can spring forth some arrangement of atoms,
atoms identical to those make up the inanimate objects around us, it because
less weird when you think about a car just being made up of nuts, bolts, and a
bunch of metal, or a space shuttle out of ceramic, composites and what have
you. Computers are just made up of transistors, capacitors and the like, and
have tremendous capabilities.

Humans are just the most extreme example we have of this phenomenon of
complexity through composition, but that makes a certain kind of sense as
humans are the product of billions of years of evolution. We've only been
seriously studying consciousness for a good hundred years or so (people have
thought about it for quite some time, but I think it's fair to say no clear
progress was made on the subject until the 20th century).

~~~
RivieraKid
> I think that's pretty easy to explain. The change of state in your brain
> modulates the thing that it both creates and controls (consciousness) state
> to "feel" pain.

It's certainly not easy to explain. I have no idea what that means. You're
basically saying that change of physical state causes pain. Why? Is that some
physical law I haven't heard of?

> Consciousness is a emergent property of the incredible complex organ we call
> a brain. At first it may seem too odd to think that something as incredibly
> surreal and deep as consciousness can spring forth some arrangement of
> atoms, atoms identical to those make up the inanimate objects around us, it
> because less weird when you think about a car just being made up of nuts,
> bolts, and a bunch of metal, or a space shuttle out of ceramic, composites
> and what have you. Computers are just made up of transistors, capacitors and
> the like, and have tremendous capabilities.

The big difference here is that computers or cars are physical concepts, the
definition of a car could be that it's a certain arangement of atoms.

------
kendallpark
Mind-body dualism is the bane of my existence.

My thoughts on this article:

1\. The fact that we cannot scientifically determine how something functions
does not necessary imply a non-physical cause.

2\. Thought experiments are inherently limited to human conceptualizations
which--while based in reality--have no authority over reality. Here's a famous
thought experiment: Descartes believed that clear and distinct perceptions can
be certain. I can think about a horse and a dog separately, so they most be
different things, right? Well, I can also think about time and space as
distinct entities but guess what they're not. Thought experiments are entirely
limited by human intuition and human intuition is not guaranteed to properly
reflect reality. The fact that you can imagine a zombie of yourself has no
bearing on reality. I can imagine traveling faster than the speed of light but
that doesn't make it possible.

3\. When systems reach sufficient enough complexity it is impossible to
understand them by merely analyzing the individual components and
understanding the rules that govern them. Even if I had full knowledge of the
human brain and how it worked, there would be no way for me to understand
another person's first person perspective because there would be no way for me
to simulate his brain. Mary's Room, qualia, and Mooreland's argument from
first person perspective are all dependent upon the assumption that if you can
understand the components of such a system, you ought be able to understand
the whole. This premise is false.

4\. There are plenty of "nonphysical" entities that we presume to have an
entirely physical basis. Take the operating system on your computer. Is your
OS a physical object? A physical property? It's real. You can interact with
it. But if you pry about your hard drive you will not find a little desktop
with folders and icons. Even if you could read the one's and zero's off the
magnetic disk that wouldn't be considered your operating system. It only
exists when all the pieces are connected and running and has no value (or
existence) without such animation. Nonphysical entity. Physical cause.

Some reading:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halting_problem](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halting_problem)
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cellular_automaton](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cellular_automaton)

~~~
rosser
Why do you equate the Hard Problem with dualism? I've met Chalmers, and read
much of his _oeuvre_ , and he's most emphatically not a dualist. No-one in the
field takes "strong" (or even most varieties of "weak") dualism remotely
seriously any more. Frankly, I feel like you're straw-manning a bit here, by
attacking a position that's not even under discussion.

~~~
kendallpark
Where did I equate the Hard Problem with dualism? I'm contending with a view
that this article surveyed. Namely,

"Nonetheless, just occasionally, science has dropped tantalising hints that
this spooky extra ingredient might be real."

Furthermore, Point #2 attacks the use of thought experiments as a means of
understand the Hard Problem. Point #3 relates to why the Hard Problem is so
hard. Point #4 gives an analogy supporting Dennett's position.

~~~
rosser
As far as I understand it, one of the main things that makes the Hard Problem
so hard is "epistemic asymmetry": the only consciousness you can _even know
exists_ is your own. _That 's_ the point of p-zombies, not to be a clever
thought experiment (about which you're mostly right, btw), but to very
pointedly illustrate the very real, and very frustrating fact that (thus far)
there is _no proof whatsoever_ that the notional "lights are on" anywhere else
in the universe but in one's own skull.

As for point #4, and Dennett, I'm going to have to beg off discussing, because
I don't want to have to resort to that kind of language before lunch. (Read:
really, really not a fan.)

~~~
Marazan
You don't know your own consciousness exists. You can just be experiencing
something that is not consciousness but that you think is. That's the
ludicrous banality of the Hard Problem.

~~~
rosser
_You can just be experiencing something that is not consciousness..._

That's what consciousness _is_ : to borrow Thomas Nagel's phrase (which
Chalmers also uses frequently), "the thing that it feels like" to be
something. By every reasonable definition I've ever heard — and I've studied
and read about this stuff for decades — that's pretty much a constant:
consciousness is the experiential part of ... you know, _experience_. Yes,
it's entirely possible — even common — to be mistaken or misled about the
_content_ of your experience, but _not the fact that you are experiencing_.

In a discussion already absurdly full of sophistry, your comment should win a
very large, gaudy prize.

~~~
Marazan
In that case consciousness doesn't seem that Hard.

------
jimrandomh
The Hard Problem of Consciousness(tm) can't be answered because it isn't a
question at all; it's just a confusion. People who like to worship mystery are
attracted to it, because it sucks to have your sacred mystery pulled out from
under you by an explanation.

~~~
rosser
Then explain how it is that _meat_ can _feel_. There is absolutely nothing
inherent in the nature of meat, as far as we can quantify, that entails
feeling.

So, please, yank my sacred mystery out from beneath me: what's the
explanation?

~~~
tjradcliffe
> There is absolutely nothing inherent in the nature of meat...

This is like declaring there is absolutely nothing inherent in the nature of
matter to have temperature. Anyone making such a declaration would be looked
at strangely if they wanted to enter a discussion on the nature of
temperature.

Declaring from the outset that there is anything particularly weird about
biological systems being conscious, when one of the most basic, widely-
accepted facts about biological systems is that they can be conscious, is not
a good move. It sets up the problem as a Big Mystery, which is what the OP is
pointing out.

There are some "problems" that many people are never going to accept the
solution to. Every few years someone publishes "the definitive answer" on the
Mona Lisa's smile, and I still see people asking, "does nature or nurture
cause behaviour?" as if it was a serious or interesting question.

Likewise, there is a very significant chunk of the population dedicated to the
proposition that "consciousness is fundamentally mysterious", and one day when
we have it worked out pretty well why some complex systems have this emergent
property, those people will still be ending articles on the subject with coy
gibberish about how "...in the end, you can't reduce the magic of conscious
experience to an equation."

Sure you can. And we will, in the same way we came to understand temperature
as an emergent property of systems of interacting particles in closed systems,
without recourse of phlogiston or caloric or any other thermodynamic secret
sauce.

~~~
rosser
"emergent property"

That, right there, is why I reject this kind of argument. It's not
parsimonious. Temperature isn't an "emergent property". It's a name we've
given to a _measurable_ phenomenon; in fact, it's the name of the measurement,
_itself_.

Another un-parsimonious notion: "one of the most basic, widely-accepted facts
about biological systems is that they can be conscious". Okay, if they _can_
be conscious, what makes one conscious and another not? Why am I blessed with
the gift of consciousness, but my cat isn't? Or if she is, why her, but not
the spider in my bathroom she loves to torment? Or if it is, why not the
bacterium on my toilet seat?

Drawing imaginary lines somewhere in the middle of reality and saying "things
on this side of the line have squooblith, but things on that side don't" is
going to require a bit of explanation as to why the line is there, and not
somewhere else.

For myself, the most parsimonious answer I can find to all this is that
consciousness is an intrinsic property of _matter, itself_. So, sure, a rock
(let alone a molecule of gypsum) is going to have a markedly different _kind_
of experience than I do, what's to say that it doesn't have some kind of
experience? It also nicely eliminates this "mystery" everyone seems to be down
on: what could possibly be mysterious about something that is _literally
everywhere_?

But that's just me, and I readily admit that I'm rather anomalous, have
studied this stuff for far too long, and taken a nontrivial amount of
psychedelics. So, you know, grain of salt, _& c_.

~~~
zzalpha
But emergent properties are everywhere.

Consider Conway's Game of Life. A few basic rules and you end up with
remarkable, emergent complexity. The game of Go is another beautiful example.

The same is true of any number of phenomenon. Break them down to their basic
elements and it's not clear how the emergent properties arise, and yet they
do.

So is the brain just "meat"? Maybe. But that doesn't preclude incredible
emergent complexity.

------
gus_massa
> _Philosophers and scientists have been at war for decades over the question
> of what makes human beings more than complex robots_

[Citation needed]

It's the same problem that AI has. AI is whatever a computer can't do.

A few decades ago the computer couldn't play chess, so chess was a good
example of AI. Once the computers could play chess and easily wind a match
against a grand master, the we can see behind the curtain and understand the
tricks, and now chess is only a circus trick and no real AI.

For now, computers can't simulate consciousness, so it's a mystery and a good
AI research topic.

~~~
kyberias
I'm a layman but I don't think that's fair. When I think about "good AI", that
we haven't achieved yet, I think about Data from Star Trek. I'm pretty sure
we'll know when we've reached that level of AI. We're not there yet.

~~~
patmcc
If we had that, I suspect lots of people would say "ah, well, that's just a
clever bit of programming - it's not really
thinking/feeling/alive/conscious/whatever, so I'd hardly call that good AI".

Also I'd bet the body helps - if you had a 'cloud' (not android) version of
Data, people would be even harder to convince.

~~~
bduerst
I've had those same discussions.

The entertainment industry has set a pretty strange standard for A.I. with the
general public. What A.I. will eventually become will probably be wildly
different than a limited personification like Data in Star Trek.

The first automobiles looked like horse-drawn carriages, so maybe it's not
right to fault people for expecting A.I. to look like humans.

------
dschiptsov
It is funny to watch that no one have mentioned Indian Philosophy, which could
be studied in Oxford and other places. It has lots to say about the nature of
consciousness.

"Not invented here" bias at its best.)

------
koalala
Warning: The following may sound like mumbo-jumbo until you've finished
reading.

As someone in another comment here mentioned, the last time something that was
not understood was nigh declared magic and unphysical or ignored even by
educated men was in the 17th century, and the phenomenon was light.

If you accept panpsychism, the idea that consciousness is not limited to
brains (examples: i feel and react to pain but my dog reacts to pain as well,
and even certain trees are now known to release signal chemicals into the soil
which cause nearby trees to harden their bark when they are damaged), and also
accept that consciousness is a field/fundamental force that couples(interacts)
with the other fields, and with matter, it becomes plausible to say that an
interaction between two particles will also cause an interaction with the
'consciousness field'.

Of course all of this is complete speculation because it seems to be
impossible to measure the properties of said field, as the proposed
interaction would be one-way (examples: when i burn my hand with scalding hot
water, a circuit in my brain/body which relies on known forces and
interactions causes my hand to move away, yet i feel pain).

I don't see how wave function collapse, which has frequently been mentioned in
connection with this, could be related, as it's not even known what wave
function collapse actually is, much like our current problem with
consciousness.

Disclaimer: IAAP

------
kailuowang
My own view over the philosophy of mind is closest to the identity theory -
"states and processes of the mind are identical to states and processes of the
brain." [[http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/mind-
identity/](http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/mind-identity/)] I also think
that mind is nothing but the states and processes, so another way to put it,
mind is the ongoing states and processes of the brain.

Using computer systems as an analogy, the brain is the hardware, the mind is
the software code and run-time states of this system. Some of the software
code was written by genetics but the majority of them are written after birth
by the environment. Now there are two major differences between computer
system and a human:

a: computer systems are Turing machines, humans are not. Human uses intuition
to perform induction which Turing machine can not (because induction is not
logic). And induction is such an important foundation of human understanding
of the world that I believe a Turing machine's understanding of the world
based on pure logic would be very different.

b: human minds is aware of himself, he can think about his own mind, and think
about the thinking about his own mind. It is like if the software can model
the software itself, without entering an endless recursive loop. That is
fundamental property of consciousness.

My guess is that the fact that human mind relies on intuition rather than
logic (non Turing machine) is the reason he can recursively think about
himself while computer can't, after all he intuitively knows when to stop and
jump out of the recursive loop.

------
AnimalMuppet
Panpsychism... really? We're going to reject God as an explanation, because
the physical universe is all there is, and then say that the universe is
conscious? Seriously? That's not an explanation, that's a "just so" story. In
fact, it's a very short step from there to pantheism (everything is God).

And in fact, God (the theistic version) would explain this perfectly. Drop
your materialistic assumptions for a moment, and hear me out. If God exists,
as a being with consciousness and personality, and if he created humans "in
his own image", then we are not faced with the Hard Problem of Consciousness.
Humans can then be truly conscious, and have true personality, without those
things being just a configuration of atoms.

The pantheistic version of God doesn't work as well, because it's ultimately
impersonal (despite the "theistic" part of the word). There's no way in
pantheism for personality to be anything more than an illusion, which
ironically is the same problem that materialism has with consciousness.

~~~
protonfish
Koch has been pushing panpsychism in the media a lot and it is really
unfortunate because it is poor science. If I were Paul Allen, I'd find
somebody less publicly embarrassing to head my Brain Science Institute.

------
_red
Its possible the confusion is not understanding what consciousness is.

The common accepted notion is that reality is made of small pieces of matter
(ie. atoms), which in turn when then combined sufficiently gives rise to
consciousness. Therefore its matter at the core, and consciousness arises from
it.

Its quite possible that the order is wrong: Namely the universe may actually
be composed on a foundation of consciousness.

Specifically, the idea is that consciousness is a force like all other forces
(ie. magnetism, gravity, etc). However, this universal force of consciousness
causes quantum-waves to collapse, hence why there is something instead of
nothing.

The brain evolved in much like all your other sensory organs (eyes, ears,
touch, taste) - in that it detects and can presumably interact with these
naturally occurring 'force of consciousness'.

This explanation also solves many of the various quantum-physics implied
paradoxes.

*typo: way -> why

~~~
vectorpush
I was with you up until this line:

> _However, this universal force of consciousness causes quantum-waves to
> collapse, hence way there is something instead of nothing._

The phenomenon described as consciousness has nothing to do with wave-function
collapse, it is the act of measurement that is responsible for the collapse,
whether conscious or otherwise.

~~~
_red
This is known as the "von Neumann–Wigner interpretation" its not feel-good
pseudo-science no matter how strange it may sound.

~~~
thirdtruck
I'm afraid it is. The issue stems from confusing the popular usage of
"observed" (i.e. by a person) with how the term is used by quantum physicists
(i.e. the interaction of the quantum particles with _any_ other particles).
That is to say: For the purposes of quantum physics, it's the hardware of the
LHC that's doing the "observing," long before the scientists observe its
output on the monitor.

~~~
_red
I think you are misinterpreting what is meant by "force of consciousness", in
that it doesn't necessarily imply an observer in the colloquial sense. Its not
meant to imply any supernatural or otherwise mystical existence - not any more
than the 'force of gravity' or whatever.

To state it another way, why does the universe exist at all? Why is it not
just a jumbled mess of superposition quantum states? We know at the deepest
levels there is a wave-particle paradox to most of what exist, so what causes
the collapse to happen so that particles can exist?

The standard answer is that the question itself is a form of survivorship-
bias, meaning because our universe is one in which superposition states
collapsed into regular particles, is what allowed humans to evolve to even
pose the question.

However, there is an alternative, which is that the universe exist because the
'force of consciousness' was present to cause those collapses, which then in
turn provided an environment which animals could evolve and eventually detect
/ interact with that underlying force.

~~~
thirdtruck
And what independently testable, otherwise non-reproducible effect on the
physical world would this "underlying force" have? This explanation reeks of
the same long discredited arguments used by Creationists.

~~~
_red
What independently testable, reproducible effects can you ascribe to
"hyperstring theory" or any other postulations of modern theoretical physics?
Is even "big bang theory" (although imminently logical), actually testable?

It all becomes philosophy and metaphysics after a certain threshold.

------
lerno
This problem has been understood and resolved by a number of thinkers. The
Buddha, lots of buddhist masters, then we also have people like Eckhart Tolle
who clearly realise it.

The problem is that consciousness is goes beyond conventional logic and
descriptions. Interestingly, if it could be grasped by conventional logic it
would lose the characteristics of consciousness.

A similar (possibly related) question is why anything exists at all (including
why even the concept of something existing exists!)

Unfortunately, having no intuitive insight, I cannot lay claim to an answer,
but then notably other thinkers seem to agree that consciousness lies beyond
what can be directly explained anyway.

There is an odd branch of logic which allows contradictory statements,
possibly such a tool could be used to formally analyse some of the properties
of consciousness.

------
chanakya
A lot of people seem to be dismissing this as "not a problem" or "not well
defined". Can you expand on this so I can understand it?

It seems to me that there is a disconnect between:

\- the standard scientific view of reality as consisting of fundamental
particles and the laws relating them - and,

\- the experience of _being_ somebody, an experience that all of us have.

The standard view may well end up providing a good explanation of the
experience (and some people seem optimistic that it will), but I don't
understand how it can be dismissed. That's like saying that the EM spectrum of
hydrogen cannot be explained by classical electrodynamics, and so is a non-
problem.

EDIT:layout

------
JackFr
No one seems to address the very germane question of whether consciousness is
separable from language, or rather communication more broadly. Is it possible
to have language, and not be conscious? Is it possible to be conscious and not
have language?

Though no one takes Julian Jaynes seriously these days, but I think his ideas
of the development of language preceding consciousness are as good as any
other theories I've read.

[http://www.amazon.com/Origin-Consciousness-Breakdown-
Bicamer...](http://www.amazon.com/Origin-Consciousness-Breakdown-Bicameral-
Mind/dp/0618057072)

------
pointernil
How about "The Attention Schema Theory", it even provides a thesis about the
evolutionary development of the "phenomenon".

Quite a read btw: "Consciousness and the Social Brain", 2013, Oxford
University Press

[1]
[http://www.princeton.edu/~graziano/Consciousness_Research.ht...](http://www.princeton.edu/~graziano/Consciousness_Research.html)

------
scnthrowaway
This is all quite well discussed in Scientology, a subject so controversial
that people rarely make the effort to dig deeper than the understanding of the
subject offered by tabloid article editors and people interested in destroying
the organization, while ignoring the _subject_.

 _You_ are a spiritual being, aware of being aware. Consciousness is the state
of being aware of being aware. It can be attenuated, and it can be enhanced,
by the unit of spirit itself, represented in Scientology by the mathematical
symbol: theta, which is used because it represents infinity.

Anyone wanting to know more can study the subject without getting into too
much controversy - all it takes is to read the books about the subject made
available in any library. This is the _very thing_ that the subject is
intended to explore and define, and it is a very thorough investigation indeed
- covering everything from the most basic axioms of life all the way to
applying the properties of theta in the modern, present time world.

But of course, the hubris and hysteria about the organization and its
activities precludes an honest look at the real, very well defined, details of
the subject. Get past the hysteria, and you will find a perfectly workable,
perfectly acceptable definition of consciousness. However, that's not as easy
as it sounds, alas, in this modern hubristic world..

------
orthecreedence
Perhaps the answer to the question of "what is consciousness" can't be reached
by thinking. Maybe there's not a logical answer in the same way we find
reasons to explain the world around us. That would explain why the greatest
minds can't solve the mystery.

Either that, or our species is just not evolved enough to comprehend the
problem.

------
applecore
What exactly is the “mystery” of consciousness? This article is a long read,
but it doesn't really formulate the question.

~~~
snikeris
From the article:

It was a puzzle so bewildering that, in the months after his talk, people
started dignifying it with capital letters – the Hard Problem of Consciousness
– and it’s this: why on earth should all those complicated brain processes
feel like anything from the inside? Why aren’t we just brilliant robots,
capable of retaining information, of responding to noises and smells and hot
saucepans, but dark inside, lacking an inner life? And how does the brain
manage it? How could the 1.4kg lump of moist, pinkish-beige tissue inside your
skull give rise to something as mysterious as the experience of being that
pinkish-beige lump, and the body to which it is attached?

~~~
thirdtruck
Thank you for bringing in the snippet.

To analyse its contents, I'll ask this: what's to say that a computer doesn't
experience some very primitive form of consciousness? If we unplugged
everything except the power cord, but left a complicated simulation running,
it would still have something like "a rich inner life." Its peripherals and
sensors give it a sense of a body and, with abstract drivers, a degree of
conceptual separation from said hardware. Doubly so in the case of virtual
machines. After all, we can't "truly" experience the same thing that a
computer might from the inside, so who are we to doubt "computer
consciousness?"

If the proponents of "The Hard Problem of Consciousness" can't give a
quantified explanation of how to distinguish a theoretical computer
consciousness from a human one, that raises the question of whether the
problem actually exists.

For my part, I don't believe in consciousness as a concrete thing, only a
label we use to group together quite a few disparate systems and phenomenon.
It's the same way that I don't believe in "Ruby" as a concrete thing, but only
in the unit tests, the sample code, the docs, and the thoughts in Matz's head
that we subconsciously conflate.

------
Marazan
To expand on my earlier dismissal. The hard problem states 1 Consciousness has
a special property 2 Physical process are insufficient to have the special
property 3 Zomg what is consciousness 4 We are totally not Dualists, honest

The answer is either A) Conciousness is the result of a physical process Or B)
You are a Dualist, stop lying to yourself.

------
lmkg
I strongly encourage people to read the book _The Origin of Consciousness in
the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind_ by Julian Jaynes. He makes some rather
solid and defensible statements about consciousness (included falsifiable
predictions that were later validated with brain imaging), and then makes some
rather fantastical inferences. It's thought-provoking.

One of the very first things he does in that book is provide a definition of
consciousness that he uses throughout the book. It's a more concrete
definition than I've seen in most other places, and in part because it's _very
small_. Like most others, I tend to roll my eyes a bit when philosophers start
talking about how consciousness is the act of feeling and experiencing, and is
the core of being, and is the sum totality of human experience, and start
getting all mystic about it. Jaynes takes the opposite approach: it's not all
and everything of human experience, it's exactly one specific thing about
human experience.

Specifically, introspection. The ability to not just observe the real world,
but to create a simulated world in our minds and observe that. Replay
memories, or test hypothetical present or future situations. Anything else
unique about the human mind is taken to be a consequence of consciousness,
rather than a part of it.

Another big thing he does is show that activities that we normally think of as
conscious and rational/intelligent are actually not taking place in the
consciousness (these are backed by experimental evidence). For example, chess
players get a lot of their performance from perception that filters
information before it hits the consciousness. For another, decision-making is
shown to be a pre-conscious activity, and a person's supposed line of
reasoning is actually a post-hoc rationalization of the decision that the sub-
conscious mind dumped into the consciousness (I forget the details of how this
is demonstrated). The latter result is... disturbing, because it challenges
your notion of free will. But the more I observe myself and others, I can't
help but think it's true.

One major upshot of this: I think there's sort of an implicit assumption that
consciousness is some sort of "higher form" of intelligence. Jayne's work
casts doubt on that. It seems that consciousness interacts with intelligence,
but most of our "intelligence" does not come from (what he considers) the
faculty of consciousness.

Observationally, this seems to agree with the state of AI research, and the
distinction between weak AI and strong AI. In fact, if one accepts his
theories, then weak AI is actually just unqualified Artificial Intelligence,
and what we currently call strong AI is not AI at all, but Artificial
Consciousness, which should rightly be a separate field.

~~~
kevbin
Great recommendation of a great book—you made me wish I could read it again
for the first time. I love that book: grand title, compelling style, and
fascinating ideas that linger for years.

------
macspoofing
There is no unambiguous definition of consciousness because there's a segment
of the population that will not accept a definition unless it includes spooky
woo-woo magic.

------
crimsonalucard
How can we solve a problem about a word that isn't clearly defined?

First we need to solve the problem of defining what consciousness is.

I assure you once we define it, the problem is solved.

~~~
AnimalMuppet
I think that there are two possible definitions, and they get confused. This
confusion does not help us to think clearly about the question.

Definition 1: Consciousness is awareness of your external environment. By that
definition, my dog is conscious, insects are, and cars are becoming so. And if
cars are conscious, then this must be a mechanistic property - it just takes
enough sensors (and perhaps complex enough wiring).

Definition 2: Consciousness is awareness of your own awareness - being able to
watch yourself think, and to think about thinking. By that definition, humans
are conscious, but I'm not sure about dogs, or even apes. It is much less
clear that this is purely mechanistic.

But when we have these discussions, it's going to be helpful to specify which
version we're talking about.

~~~
crimsonalucard
Define awareness. Once you define awareness.... Problem solved!

------
vfclists
Have they considered that it is only in consciousness that the notion of
solving the mystery of consciousness can arise?

It is consciousness asking itself how it came into existence, but existence
itself means arising in the field of consciousness, as it is only in
consciousness that the notion of existence can arise.

Dudes are going to chase their tails forever.

------
Marazan
Predicated on the concept that the Hard Problem of Consciousness is actually a
problem.

------
dominotw
i can't take anyone who uses the word "consciousness" seriously, given noone
has any idea what it actually means.

~~~
snikeris
Is your own experience not enough? It is a phenomenon that you are
experiencing right now.

------
s1s
So today I read the article on the Guardian website. It was about how the
world's smartest minds could not seem to figure out consciousness. In it, they
mentioned the problem of how there seems to be something more than just the
physical stuff making up the body. But else could this other thing be?

All I could think of was that these guys did not do much computer programming.
Everybody who is doing programming has heard of the binary search algorithm.
At school, you first are taught a computer language or two. Next you take a
data structures and algorithms class. You can not pass unless you know and can
write from memory the binary search algorithm.

In English, it goes something like this. Assume an ordered array of values.
Also assume two indices's, initially at the beginning and end of the array.
Pick the location at the mid-point of the two indices's. Is it the one we are
looking for? If so, quit and return the location index. Otherwise if the value
at the mid-point is greater than the search key, move the upper index to the
mid-point. Otherwise, the mid-point value must be less than the search key and
we move the lower index to the mid-point. Repeat until either the search key
is found or the upper and lower indices's meet.

In essence, this is roughly how you search a phone book for a name. Everyone
above the age of ten knows this algorithm.

What is interesting is that the algorithm is the same, no matter the language
in which it is described. English, French, Algol or C.

The algorithm is recognizable as essentially the same in the unoptimized
version described above or in an improved version where it is noticed that
having once examined the mid-point, it is no longer necessary to consider it
again and the indices's can be moved one location before or after the mid-
point.

The algorithm is the same even in the human version wherein the pages of the
phone book are searched without exactly choosing a mid-point. Instead, a rough
estimate of the mid-point is chosen and that works just about as well.

So is the algorithm a thing? Yes, of course. It is recognizable. You read some
unknown code and all of a sudden, the algorithm pops out of the confusion of
its coding and you see the idea that the writer was attempting to reach. You
can then look at the code in a new light and determine if the expression of
the idea was accurate and free of mistake.

Is the algorithm a physical thing? Not at all. There can be expressions of the
idea which somewhat become physical in marks of ink on paper or in coded holes
in paper or even the the arrangement of a linear encoding of magnetic flux,
displayed in the pulsing of electrons encountering a glowing phosphor screen.

As was alluded to above, even the representations of the algorithm are somehow
at the limits of physicality.

One can even speak of the intelligence of the algorithm or in other words, the
appropriateness of the algorithm to the problem domain.

For example, the algorithm depends on the amount of time required to access
the array elements being roughly the same. The algorithm could become self-
aware if the access to the array elements were abstracted into a function and
the execution of the access function timed. If the algorithm were to be
enhanced to account for this time, it could notice a violation of the basic
constraints if the access times varied by much from the norm. It could even
raise an alert and signal alarm at the discrepancy.

Suppose that some bone-headed programmer were to implement the binary search
algorithm in layers of abstraction. But instead of representing the data in an
array, the dunderhead was to layer the binary search function over a linked-
list data representation. Recall that to find an item in a linked list, one
must start at the first element and then examine additional elements until
either the search key is located or the end of the list is reached. This form
of layering obviously violates the equal access provision and would be a
"stupid" algorithm. Or a “ugly” composition of otherwise decent ideas.

As a parenthetical note, I take this previous example from an actual discovery
in examining some purchased code for which my company had paid something like
$50,000 dollars. When I mentioned this to my counterpart, the support engineer
of the seller, he acknowledged the error but countered with the observation
that the stupidity in the code was not significant as the number of items in
the list was never large enough to matter. Needless to say, my expectations
regarding the code, the engineer, and the company were reset in a downwards
direction.

So in conclusion, an instrumented algorithm with an awareness of time, can be
aware of deviations. Deviations can produce an alarm which can be sensed by
other parts of the system. This kind of a system is at some level, "self-
aware". And it is based on ideas which are non-physical and in some sense
eternal or outside of time. Ideas which can be composited or layered.

So the question now is this. Can ideas be composited naturally or do they
require a programmer?

To argue the first case is to argue for evolution and the second, for a god.

But in the first case, evolution, you still reach the point of the existence
of a programmer.

Which in the limit, becomes a god, provided that communications costs are held
sufficiently low and the efforts of all programmers can combine in a non-
stupid manner. Probably not with money being the motivating force but rather a
love of beauty and elegance at the core of their efforts.

