
The unending quest to explain consciousness - hoffmannesque
https://www.bookforum.com/print/2604/the-unending-quest-to-explain-consciousness-23772
======
mellosouls
My personal preference is for _panexperientialism_ (essentially a bare bones
panpsychism), with the idea that the phenomenon is somehow connected with
change, and belongs to anything capable of change in some way and is probably
a fundamental property of nature, as fundamental as space or time.

It's important to divorce consciousness from all ideas of "thought", "will"
etc. to consider it's essence which is more connected with "awareness of
being", though even that is too complex I think.

Obviously this is complete conjecture, but it has growing philosophical
support - at least as an idea worth discussing - I think.

[http://www.eoht.info/page/Panexperientialism](http://www.eoht.info/page/Panexperientialism)

~~~
incompatible
Probably because consciousness requires some kind of underlying mental
processes, which take time to achieve. I can only guess that it's similar to
an instance of a computer program such as a web browser, i.e., it isn't a
"thing" itself but is built out of a multitude of underlying calculations on a
physical computer.

This also implies to me that consciousness, not being a physical thing itself,
comes and goes within the brain, with the sleep cycle or just through lack of
attention. The only interaction between one instance of consciousness and the
following one would then be via memories.

~~~
yohsii
consciousness does not require a brain. consciousness is fundamental to the
universe

~~~
CuriouslyC
Indeed. To go even farther, I suspect that there is nothing other than
consciousness. There are no particles and forces, only awareness and will. The
stuff of physics is emergent from statistical properties of consciousness over
a large scale.

~~~
CharlesColeman
> Indeed. To go even farther, I suspect that there is nothing other than
> consciousness. There are no particles and forces, only awareness and will.

I believe the word for that is idealism.

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

[https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/berkeley/](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/berkeley/)

------
pygy_
Manzotti’s account (as described in the article) ignores dreams, or the fact
that directly zapping the brain elicits experience (e.g. magnetic stimulation
of the visual cortex triggers colorful flashes known as phosphenes).

Graziani’s approach is more interesting, as a theory of attention, but falls
short on qualia, and focuses on peculiarities of the human brain, assuming
that a cerebral cortex is necessary for generating a conscious experience.

My pet theory is that consciousness can be modeled as a mathematical dual of
the physical world. Think Voronoi diagrams vs. Delaunay triangulation. They
are distinct, imbued with their own properties, but inextricably linked in
that you can generate one from the other.

~~~
youareostriches
What makes you believe that your conscious perceptions have any specific (let
alone regularizeable) kind of relationship to reality at all? In all
likelihood, conscious perceptions are guided entirely by evolution,
emphasizing those aspects of reality needed to keep us alive and filtering out
those we can safely ignore.

[https://www.nature.com/articles/544296a?WT.mc_id=FBK_NA_1704...](https://www.nature.com/articles/544296a?WT.mc_id=FBK_NA_1704_FHBOOKSARTSPERCEPTION_PORTFOLIO&foxtrotcallback=true)

~~~
acqq
> conscious perceptions are guided entirely by evolution, emphasizing those
> aspects of reality needed to keep us alive and filtering out those we can
> safely ignore.

It's also known that it's often enough evolutionary advantageous having the
model of the surroundings which is _more accurate_ than that of your
competition (There's some paper I've read about that, I just don't have the
time to find it now. Maybe somebody has some more ready).

Therefore the successful products of evolution correctly reflect "outside
world" in their models, and even have the "safety mechanisms" and "error
correction" facilities (based on the feedback, of course). There are even
experiments with people: if you'd get the glasses that invert the picture you
see, you'd for a while see the world top down, but if you wear them long
enough, the internal adjustment of the model would happen and you'd see again
up as up, even if the "signal" is provably reversed compared to what you
received for your whole life.

On the opposite side (that the "accurate enough" is not "always correct") we
also already know the examples where the "accuracy" breaks in humans: that's
the cause of people ascribing to the agency of gods the phenomena with purely
natural causes. There wasn't evolutionary need for an intrinsic development of
more accurate model of these phenomena (e.g. what makes the Sun move across
the sky or what the stars are). The scientific method, luckily, allowed humans
as a group to overcome these limitations, e.g. Aristarchus, some 2200 years
ago, that is, at least 200 years BCE:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Sizes_and_Distances_(Ar...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Sizes_and_Distances_\(Aristarchus\))
(note, at that time the term "science" still didn't exist).

~~~
pygy_
Re. Flipping images I actually experienced it first hand. I live in
continental Europe where cars are driven on the right side of the road.

A few years ago, I spent a week in southwest England, with my car. Upon
arrival, driving on the left and passing on the right felt weird, but after a
few minutes of practice on the highway, I was starting to get good driving
sensations... then the weirdest thing happened: for a brief moment, I
experienced the text on road signs and license plates as mirrored. My brain
had gone overboard and flipped the whole scene :-). Then It quickly subsided
and I went on to discover the fair weather of Cornwall.

------
corporate_shi11
The closest we will ever come to describing consciousness is simply describing
the correlates of consciousness. The "ultimate cause" of it will forever be a
mystery, behind the veil.

Consciousness appears to exist outside of the physical world, in that we can
describe a physical process entirely without invoking consciousness. Because
of this, consciousness is beyond the scientific method and our fundamental
understanding _in principle_ , not just in practice.

This is why it is called the "hard problem" of consciousness. In principle,
there is no framework of deduction or reasoning by which we can explain the
emergence of qualia.

It is beyond us.

~~~
Tenoke
>Consciousness appears to exist outside of the physical world, in that we can
describe a physical process entirely without invoking consciousness.

Only in the same ways that e.g. emotions exist 'outside of the physical world'
and we are doing some work with those (e.g. we know more about the effects of
hormones on them now).

I completely disagree that this is unstudiable or 'behind the veil'. We can
create beings with consciousness (babies) using a purely physical process, of
course there is some way to learn more.

Personally, I assume the main problem is (as it so often happens) that
'consciousness' is too loosely defined and explaining it will be easier with
more strict definitions and a deeper understanding of the brain and body.

~~~
corporate_shi11
So what is qualia, or the experience of conscious beings?

~~~
protonfish
Qualia is not a scientific concept and really needs to be dismissed. (By
definition it cannot be measured or observed.) I doubt you agree, but any
study of consciousness that has a chance of succeeding will need to be
extremely rigorous. I believe that an explanation of consciousness - much like
the theory of evolution - will be both very simple and very unpopular.

~~~
corporate_shi11
>"Qualia is not a scientific concept"

That is true.

>"And really needs to be dismissed"

I would agree with you if it weren't for these darn images and sounds and
thoughts that flood my mind every time I wake up from the un-consciousness of
sleep.

It seems to me that you're recognizing the impossibility of scientific study
of qualia itself (rather than correlates of it) but you are then taking the
radical step of dismissing it simply because it cannot be studied
scientifically. That's where we differ.

~~~
cr0sh
> every time I wake up from the un-consciousness of sleep.

Do you not dream when you sleep (I mean, when you enter REM state)?

I know there are people who don't - but most of us I believe do dream (and
some of us can become "conscious" of being in the dream state, while
continuing to dream - aka, so-called "lucid dreaming").

I'm not a researcher or anything in regards to consciousness - but I wonder if
there is anything that study of people who dream vs those who don't can tell
us about it?

------
acqq
"It's very hard to change people's minds about something like consciousness,
and I finally figured out the reason for that. _The reason for that is that
everybody 's an expert on consciousness._ (...) With regard to consciousness,
_people seem to think_ , each of us seems to think, " _I am an expert. Simply
by being conscious, I know all about this._ " And so, you tell them your
theory and they say, "No, no, that's not the way consciousness is! No, you've
got it all wrong." And they say this with an amazing confidence."

"A lot of people are just left _completely dissatisfied and incredulous_ when
I attempt to explain consciousness. So this is the problem. So I have to do a
little bit of the sort of work that a lot of you won't like, for the same
reason that you don't like to see a magic trick explained to you. How many of
you here, _if somebody -- some smart aleck -- starts telling you how a
particular magic trick is done, you sort of want to block your ears_ and say,
"No, no, I don't want to know! Don't take the thrill of it away. I'd rather be
mystified. _Don 't tell me the answer._" A lot of people feel that way about
consciousness."

[https://www.ted.com/talks/dan_dennett_the_illusion_of_consci...](https://www.ted.com/talks/dan_dennett_the_illusion_of_consciousness)

"in fact, _you 're not the authority_ on your own consciousness that you think
you are."

The paper: "Explaining the "magic" of consciousness", Daniel Dennett, 2003:

[https://ase.tufts.edu/cogstud/dennett/papers/explainingmagic...](https://ase.tufts.edu/cogstud/dennett/papers/explainingmagic.pdf)

~~~
mannykannot
On reading what was then the top comment on this article, I saw that it
asserted as undeniably true a highly debatable proposition. I was about to
reply, when I saw that the second did the same. The third was more of an
aphorism that looked profound until you thought about it... There do seem to
be a lot of people who want our consciousness to remain a mystery. I guess
that it is vitalism's last stand.

FWIW, I think there _is_ a 'hard problem' (more than one, in fact), but not
the one Chalmers identifies; perhaps the hardest is 'how come we (think we)
have free will?'

~~~
acqq
> how come we (think we) have free will?'

That’s easier than you think: what those who use that term for discussions
understand that term to mean is mostly based on work made by religious
apologists through the centuries. So the answer to “how come” is “to somehow
excuse the concept of having all-mighty all-knowing god while people still do
whatever.” Thus so constructed “free will” is the limit over which that all
mighty can’t cross. That’s why it’s so emotionally defended.

------
bblpeter
If the Human Brain Were So Simple That We Could Understand It, We Would Be So
Simple That We Couldn’t

~~~
SmellyGeekBoy
I personally don't think so. A computer could simulate / emulate itself, for
example.

~~~
bblpeter
Sure but then a computer doesn’t understand its own simulation so it’s apples
and oranges

------
JamOnItMahn
This is one of the many reasons why I love science fiction. Many of my
favorite novels center around consciousness and the related technology to
assist/enable/enhance it. Reading these in my younger years, many of these
novels have shaped my life, especially my career.

I may be confusing my authors, but some of the more recent novels I've read
(from about 10 years or so ago, it's been a while), I think from Alastair
Reynolds, have a wide range of ideas. Some center around the same kind of
thing that Elon Musk talks about with Neuralink. Others take a wildly
different path... putting an extant brain in a box or cabinet on wheels.

On this topic I used to be a huge fan of the concept of _uploading_. But then
I formed the opinion that, if all we're doing is _copying_ state, then the new
instance is not the old
ins[http://www.rudyrucker.com/wares/tance](http://www.rudyrucker.com/wares/tance).
It's just another instance with its own state from that point forward. I think
it's also a Reynolds book where a person creates a copy of their consciousness
and puts it into a very physically small spacecraft in order to travel a
maximum speed to a very distance place (I forget the intended task). But upon
return the two instances and ended up becoming antagonists due to their
different experiences in the meantime.

Likewise, I want to say it was a Rucker book, a person is copied, and the copy
_is not them_ , just a new instance.

That kind of soured me on uploading. However, at the same time, it seems to me
that can be akin to giving birth to the next generation. A gift of sorts.
Maybe we ourselves can not directly enjoy the benefits, but possibly we can
gift that possibility to our descendants.

I am particularly fond of old cyberpunk takes on this topic. Gibson and his
wild cyberspace characters... the Oracle and Papa Legba, the self-aware
_pimpmobile_ , and the end of the one book where entities jumped out of all
the fax machines around the world... good times.

Also Asimov and his robot-focused series.

 _I digress_

~~~
cr0sh
Regarding copying - try this thought experiment:

What if it were possible to probe a single neuron and copy its exact
functioning - that is, the actual neuron and the artificial copy both act the
same to the same inputs, and produce the same outputs. Not only that, but this
artificial neuron, once fully copied and functioning, could then be inserted
in parallel with the original. Then - kill the original.

So there's now this artificial neuron (it doesn't have to be inside the actual
brain, either!) working exactly like the original. In fact, let's say this
artificial neuron does exist outside the natural brain (and let's ignore any
propagation delays or whatnot, though in reality, anything we did with
electronics would be vastly faster than actual neuronal signal speeds).

So - we have "copied" (or "uploaded" if simulated with software) a neuron from
the brain to a new place outside of that brain.

From the brain's perspective - everything is the same.

Do it over and over and over again - until all the neurons are copied from
brain to outside of it.

Again - from the brain's perspective, everything is the same - but now it is
completely artificial - and may even be running as a simulation in some
fashion.

Now - we did this "one neuron at a time" \- but how is that fundamentally
different than if we could (somehow) make a copy "all at once in parallel"
(something similar to the transporter of Star Trek) - then killed the
original?

Of course - if that copy and the original existed and were aware at the same
time - their experiences would diverge - but what if the copy was instead
"wired" to the same inputs and such (that is, in parallel) to the original
brain. In short, kinda like the original way we were copying and killing
neurons, but this time, instead of killing the neurons (again, wired in
parallel), we let them live, then killed them all at once at the end.

Since both sets are receiving the same inputs and producing the same outputs -
where is the "being" or the "consciousness" at? Is it only in the natural
brain - or in the artificial? Both at the same time? If we killed one, but not
the other - where is the being now? Does it matter which we kill?

We could do the opposite - kill off one of the artificial neurons - and the
being should still be ok, right? But what if we randomly selected which we
killed - artificial one time, natural another - but since they are all wired
together in the same manner and were operating in the same manner in parallel
- now where is the "being"?

So - does it matter if we kill off the natural neurons in serial vs parallel?
Furthermore, assuming everything is wired together in parallel - would copying
everything, then killing off the natural side matter? At what point and "how"
does the "being" transfer from one side to the other? Furthermore, how fast
must the natural side be killed or shut off - and if there is a disconnect
between the two sides - does that matter? Like - if the natural side is
disconnected from the copy then a nanosecond later is killed - is the being
now still in the artificial copy? What does the being experience in all of
this?

The funny thing is - something like this already happens - naturally - to our
bodies every day and over time. But we retain the concept of "self" and
"being". But it happens slowly, and it doesn't happen "all at once" \- a copy
isn't made and then the original killed off, but rather cells die and are
replaced (maybe not perfectly - leading to aging, disease, and possibly death)
over the course of time - but by the above thought experiments - does that
really matter, especially if it were done quick enough?

Like - imagine a single brain - but connected to two separate but identical
bodies. When one blinks, the other blinks as well. Sever the connection with
one of the bodies - the being in the brain should "go" with the body still
connected, right? So if there are two brains, connected to the same body - and
they are both operating in identical fashion - where is the being? Which
brain? Both?

Again - this is all a thought experiment - which has been explored in depth by
many people for quite a long while. It has been explored by science fiction
several times. In both thought arenas, different conclusions have been made
over what really happens - or might happen. But really, no one can say to know
the answer.

------
ghjyui
There is also an unending quest to explain foobar. Hard to explain something
that's not defined. We can still talk about what meaning we put into this
term. My favorite analogy is the flow of electrons in a processor chip is its
consciousness and the algorithm it's performing is its cognition. Using this
analogy, consciousness is the process that updates our world, i.e. the process
that makes a photon move forward, while cognition is the logical
interpretation of these updates.

------
BlueTemplar
Author claims to "have been reading around in the field of consciousness
studies for over two decades" \+ doesn't mention neither Giulio Tononi nor
Karl Friston => comes of as kind of clueless ?

------
Pimpus
It is indeed unending, no end in sight. This should signal that there is
something fundamentally wrong with Western thinking that leaves it incapable
to even begin to grapple with the question.

Some "reputable" philosophers even deny that consciousness exists.

Anyway, here is the answer. 3 minutes and you can move on and think about more
productive things.

[https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=9n6NvDpcwLM](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=9n6NvDpcwLM)

------
bencollier49
"Unending" is right. We'll not solve this because the problem is beyond
reason.

~~~
pygy_
The existence of the world, and of myself as a subjective being, are beyond
reason. Understanding how either work provided they exist isn’t _a priori_
unsolvable.

~~~
shrimpx
A core challenge is to grasp your own subjectivity/qualia/mind. If you can
grasp it then you can write it down in some form. But the tough part is that
"grasping" is a thought production. So how can a specific thought production
represent the whole functioning of thought? And if it's not a thought
production how can it be 'understanding'? This is where the mystics come in,
who present us with a different definition of "understanding" which doesn't
involve thought productions, as in an intuitive "getting it". That may well
be, but it's useless for science and engineering.

So I think we're limited to speculation, which may well be fine.

------
paraschopra
Something that blows my mind: we can use our understanding of physics and math
to predict the trajectory of a rocket to the moon without actually going
there..

But we can’t predict what new color we’d get by mixing two colors. We just
have to mix them to find out.

~~~
AlexAltea
> But we can’t predict what new color we’d get by mixing two colors.

Can you elaborate more on this point? Links as to why this is impossible would
be appreciated. If paint absorbs certain wavelengths while reflecting others
(which are the perceived color), wouldn't the mixture of two colors absorb two
subsets of the spectrum, and reflect everything else? And if so, why can't it
be simulated?

~~~
jhrmnn
I guess OP refers to the fact that even full knowledge of the visible spectrum
cannot tell you how you will _perceive_ the color through your three-
dimensional perception system and the brain processor.

~~~
AlexAltea
That makes sense. But thinking about OP's analogy, the information of a
simulated trajectory of a rocket to the moon would also need to be delivered
through a 2D monitor with finite resolution/framerate.

Simulations will always be as good as our computing power gets, and the
results will be "understood" as good as our perception gets. So, in some
sense, both scenarios are the same.

------
mikelyons
I'm surprised that none of the comments already mention this particular
explanation:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dw44V15xgPo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dw44V15xgPo)

There have been individuals who understood consciousness for thousands of
years, one pops up every so often like in "The Matrix" but to have this person
try to explain it to the masses is casting pearls before swine.

You're talking about the very design of reality, of course the explanation is
going to be a little more radical than you're prepared for in your everyday
ego-driven state of mind.

------
adrianN
The really hard problem of consciousness is giving a definition that allows me
to tell whether a rock is more or less conscious than a person.

~~~
cygx
I find it reasonable to assume that for thought processes to occur, there must
be some processing, so rocks are out.

A more interesting example would be, say, trees, which do communicate with
each other to some degree. Is that accompanied by some form of awareness?
What's the lower bound of complexity at which consciousness kicks in? What
about supraorganisms such as insect hives? Human cities? An ecosystem as a
whole?

~~~
gear54rus
Information could be encoded in molecule oscillations and therefore 2 rocks of
different temperatures would communicate it when touching (heat transfer would
occur). Can this be considered processing?

~~~
cygx
It's doubtful you'll be able to make such a scheme work: Information
processing tends to involve storage and retrieval of data. That's not really
possible in the thermodynamic regime. You'd have to do all your processing
before the information gets lost to thermalization.

~~~
ghjyui
Image recognition needs no storage or retrieval of data: it's a single pass
thru a series of matrix multiplications. Yet, image recognition is the very
definition of data processing.

~~~
cygx
How do you propose to perform calculations without data storage (think
registers)?

~~~
adrianN
Like this for example [https://hackaday.com/2019/07/16/neural-network-in-
glass-requ...](https://hackaday.com/2019/07/16/neural-network-in-glass-
requires-no-power-recognizes-numbers/) though I'm not sure that you can really
count this as calculation. But I guess that's the point of this discussion.

------
riskneutral
The last sentence sums it up: “if you simply rule in advance that the mind
must be physical and assume that an understanding of consciousness must be a
materialist understanding, because scientific materialism is obviously
correct, you end up looking for your keys under the streetlamp because that’s
where the light is.“

~~~
Tenoke
We have good reasons to believe that _everything_ is under the streetlamp, and
little reason to think that there is something immaterial or irreducible.

This is a totally different debate though - 'Is
materialism/phyiscalism/reductionism etc. correct?'.

~~~
ghjyui
Irreducibility may be a thing, e.g. turbulence. For example, we can easily
make an ML model that recognizes an image or speech and we can explain every
little detail about how it works, but we can't explain the high level emergent
dynamics of this model and thus can't really explain how it works. I believe
we'll build a real AI soon, it'll exceed all expectations, and we still be
puzzled by the complexity of it's turbulent emergent dynamics. In other words,
if we could ask an oracle how cognition works, he would write a bunch of diff
equations followed by a million volumes of hard math theorems and the
complexity will be so irreducible that by the time we start reading volume 2,
we'd forget volume 1. Yet another way to look at it. We can imagine a square
because it's a simple object. However we can't imagine a 10 dimensional calabi
yau manifold no matter how hard we try: it has more complexity that fits into
our brains. If the theory behind cognition is as irreducible as that manifold,
well never "get" it, even though we'll be able to describe all its local
properties.

------
tim333
An interesting thing to me is the unending quest may somewhat end during our
lifetimes through us being able to build conscious AI and see how it works.

~~~
rebuilder
I doubt it. We can't prove _other humans_ are conscious, I don't see how AI
will help clarify anything there.

~~~
tim333
I'm thinking along the lines of Feynman's "What I cannot create, I do not
understand." If we can build machines with dreams, feelings and the like
similar to human ones I imagine we'll have a better understanding of how the
thing works. Bit like the difference between philosophers of old pondering how
birds fly and how to define the word flying vs aircraft designers who build
working aircraft and have degrees in aeronautical engineering.

~~~
mellosouls
Unfortunately I think this greatly underestimates the qualitative difference
of the fundamental nature of the phenomenon of consciousness to anything we
have modeled or built before.

Sure, we can and will build conscious machines (I believe), but we will do
that modelling _cognition_ \- and yes, we will develop a better understanding
of that.

But consciousness is very different and will come with the territory unbidden,
and unexplained.

------
micahjc
Tea and no tea...

------
kaffeemitsahne
The fact that crackpottish nonsense such as Manzotti's gets any mainstream
attention at all shows that we're not even remotely there yet.

------
philip142au
I suspect it doesn't exist, we wish it exists, otherwise we are machines.

~~~
SmellyGeekBoy
I'm not sure why you've been downvoted for this. The fact that our
consciousness is nothing more than the emergent behaviour of various ongoing
chemical and electrical processes doesn't sit well with some people, I guess.
Personally I derive a lot of comfort from the fact that we aren't "special".

~~~
monktastic1
I use my consciousness to infer a physical reality, which I then use to
further infer that consciousness doesn't actually exist. That doesn't strike
me as great reasoning. Certainly far from "fact."

------
carapace
The locus of sensory perception is not in the brain, out-of-body experiences
indicate that.

Thoughts are a kind of stuff different from the stuff that bodies are made of.
They kind of hover around your head, and with practice, you can learn to see
the thoughts around the heads of other people.

Emotion is again a third kind of stuff. Gurdjieff identified emotion with the
"blood" of a kind of emotional "body" that was co-extensive with but not the
same as the physical body.

This is basic, run=of-the-mill, kiddie-level metaphysics. The so-called "hard
problem" of consciousness _begins_ with the exclusion of all the relevant
information.

( If you really want to know what consciousness is, there is a wide, short
road: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramana_Maharshi#Self-
enquiry](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramana_Maharshi#Self-enquiry) )

~~~
adrianN
Out-of-body experiences have failed to provide the person experiencing them
with information that they couldn't have obtained while being in their body.
That indicates that they're not in fact extrasensory experiences, but
something that happens inside the brain.

~~~
carapace
It really depends on who you ask. There are people who routinely leave their
bodies and go about and "obtain information", as you put it. Heck, there were
Learning Annex classes on it. YMMV.

~~~
adrianN
I'm pretty sure that proof of extrasensory experience would yield you a nobel
prize, but so far all studies of the subject that I'm aware of were either
negative or had their methods heavily critized.

~~~
carapace
And yet...

I use "ESP" all the time, for trivial things: leaving the house so as to
arrive at the bus stop just before my bus does.

AFAIK, the PEAR lab came closest to formally establishing "psi" (or whatever
it is) but never in such a way as to be absolutely incontrovertible.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Princeton_Engineering_Anomalie...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Princeton_Engineering_Anomalies_Research_Lab)

It's almost as if the phenomenon is _coy_.

It's a cultural "blockage": overcome the cultural conditioning against it and
suddenly "woo-woo" is easy, even trivial. Conversely, you can float like a
cloud over the Nobel Prize committee and they _won 't look up_.

~~~
adrianN
James Randy has a million dollars waiting for you if you can convince him that
you have ESP.

~~~
carapace
If I needed a million dollars I would ESP some lottery numbers.

It's Randi, not Randy. And he's retired now and the "paranormal challenge was
officially terminated by the JREF in 2015."

Anyway, I have a lot of respect for him, he does (well, did) good and
important work.

But the inability of a guy to encounter "genuine psi" who has made it his
life's-work to show "it" to be non-existent _does not contradict_ what I've
said in this thread.

------
bloak
I expect people will give up eventually, just as they gave up trying to
explain how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.

~~~
normalnorm
An important difference is that angles are imaginary entities, while I doubt
people with give up on explaining the most direct thing they can experience,
which is their own consciousness.

~~~
ablation
> angles are imaginary entities

Tell that to Pythagoras.

~~~
normalnorm
Hehe :)

------
verytrivial
My pet theory is there is nothing to explain. It is emergent. Over the next
couple of decades, hardware performance improvements and specializations plus
algorithmic breakthroughs will make AI start to crawl up the chain from useful
pattern matching from messy data to useful dullard able to reason. And we
_still_ won't know why because the "insight" is buried in the network state
and our little human brains cannot deal with that level of detail.

~~~
normalnorm
Consider all emergent phenomena that you know of. Let's say: stock market
prices, ant hills, biological organisms, ecosystems, etc, etc. What all these
have in common, is that they are too complex to explain in terms of individual
interactions, but _you can point at the individual interaction_. We know that
financial markets are made of transactions, of that biological organisms are
made of molecular interactions, but they are too complex for us to reason in
such terms.

With consciousness, the emergentists are not capable of pointing at the first
principle, or building block. For me, the only coherent way to be an
emergentist on consciousness is to also be a panpsychist: everything is
conscious to a degree, it's just a brute fact of nature (such as, let's say,
the fundamental forces).

Maybe this is the case, but I would not bet on that.

Consciousness is a phonomenon unlike any other, in the sense that scientist
who study it are studying it _from the inside_. Science is something that
happens 100% within human consciousness. This is why I suspect that it is a
phenomenon that is beyond the reach of science. It could even be impossible to
explain. There is no reason to assume that we can solve all mysteries.

~~~
hoseja
Why can't they point to "interactions of neurons"?

~~~
normalnorm
You can point to a protein being expressed by DNA, and then understand how
many protein molecules amount to cells, then tissues, then organs. There is a
first principle guiding you all the way, even though the complexity is
staggering.

There is no such first principle with interactions of neurons, in the sense
that we know of no quality or property of a neuron that could amount to the
phenomena "consciousness", in the same way that individual transactions amount
to a stock market.

Without this first principle, it's just magical thinking disguised in
scientific language.

~~~
stromgo
Consciousness is a computation, and neurons are certainly capable of
elementary computation.

So the building block has been pointed at (neurons), and its property given
(computation). Is the problem that you don't believe that consciousness can
emerge from elementary computation, or you believe that it is possible but we
have no proof of it?

~~~
normalnorm
I have no problem with agreeing that computation can emerge from neurons. For
example, one can show how different neural configurations correspond to logic
gates, persistent memory (this requires recurrence) and so on. This is
precisely what I mean by valid emergentist models. No magic steps, just
complexity.

The problem is that you start by stating that "consciousness is a
computation", but I don't know if this is true, and neither do you.

> Is the problem that you don't believe that consciousness can emerge from
> elementary computation, or you believe that it is possible but we have no
> proof of it?

My problem is that your hypothesis that "consciousness is a computation" is
not testable, and so it does not count as a scientific theory (according to
the standard Popperian falsifiability criterion).

Unless/until we have a scientific instrument that measures consciousness, we
are just assuming things. I assume that other humans are conscious (by
analogy), but I don't know it to be true in a scientific sense.

So it's not a matter of what I believe or not, it's a matter of what science
can investigate or not. So far, it looks like the phenomenon of consciousness
is beyond its grasp.

~~~
stromgo
When you said

> With consciousness, the emergentists are not capable of pointing at the
> first principle, or building block.

...it sounded like there were no plausible candidates. If computation is a
candidate, then it's certainly something they can point at (with the caveat
that it's only a candidate and not currently testable). I think if instead you
had written something along those lines and avoided the words "not capable
of", then hoseja and I wouldn't have reacted.

