
I feel therefore I am - kawera
https://aeon.co/essays/how-and-why-exactly-did-consciousness-become-a-problem
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brianclements
_" A slew of books over the past two decades have proffered solutions to the
‘problem’ of consciousness. Among the best known are Christof Koch’s The Quest
for Consciousness: A Neurobiological Approach (2004); Giulio Tononi and Gerald
Edelman’s A Universe of Consciousness: How Matter Becomes Imagination (2000);
Antonio Damasio’s The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making
of Consciousness (1999); and the philosopher Daniel Dennett’s bluntly titled
Consciousness Explained (1991)."_

Used it for the book list.

~~~
zzzmarcus
_The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind_ by Julian
Jaynes is an interesting take on consciousness that seems to come up often in
these types of discussions.

~~~
sageikosa
...bonus points if you mention "Society of Mind" or "The Emotion Machine" by
Minsky.

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ivan_ah
> _With the advent of quantum mechanics they found that, in order to make
> sense of what their theories were saying about the subatomic world, they had
> to posit that the scientist-observer was actively involved in constructing
> reality._

Nope. This is not true. The word "observer" as used in quantum mechanics, is
an unfortunate historical accident. The observer need not be human at all---
any measurement apparatus can act as observer, and no human beings need be
present at all.

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cristianpascu
>> "When modern science swept away this dualistic symbolic schema, Europeans
came to see themselves as inhabitants of a Euclidean void: we lived on a
planet that orbited an insignificant star in potentially infinite space."

Such a gross misunderstanding of late antiquity/medieval cosmology.

"As an admirer of co-ordinate geometry, I like Tononi’s concept; at the same
time, I don’t accept information theory as a bridge to subjectivity."

In my master thesis on consciousness, I dealt with Tononi's thesis and, in
spite of the publicity he gets, I too find his theory to be bogus. It's like
saying Maxwell's equations are light. Or, put differently, it's like saying a
computer is information because it processes/produces information.

~~~
kawera
Is it really a gross misunderstanding or just a simplification? Keep in mind
that aeon.co cater to an intelligent and well read crowd but it's not a
highbrow academic publication by any means.

~~~
cristianpascu
Misunderstanding. I believe we have enough reasons to think that
ancient/medieval folks were smart enough to NOT believe gods live on the Moon.

------
sireat
I am still looking for a new edition of "Mind's I":
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mind%27s_I](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mind%27s_I)

It is a great book because of the wide range of authors (Borgess, Turing,
Serle, Lem!, etc) giving a nice introduction to what was current up to 1981.

What I want is a similar book that covers new findings/speculations since
1981.

Ideally it would also be in a chapter format and a multitude of authors with
varying ideas would be presented.

I've read Chalmers, Dennett, Hof, Serle, Jeff Hawkins etc in book format but
it would be nice to see something more concise.

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ca98am79
I think Materialism is the Flat Earth model of our era. I think everyone
intuitively knows that consciousness can't come from material things, but we
convince ourselves otherwise. Even science (e.g. with the observer effects of
quantum physics) demonstrates this, but we try to find other ways it can't be
true.

An awesome book that does a great job logically explaining how consciousness
may be fundamental is "Biocentrism" by Robert Lanza

~~~
jjaredsimpson
Materialism explains the world however. Flat earth model clearly doesn't and
was obviously false even in antiquity.

What model does dualism provide and how can I use it to make predictions about
how consciousness is embodied in physical beings. Why is it useful to
presuppose the existence of a complete separate substance to explain
consciousness.

To be brief dualism is woo woo.

>I think everyone intuitively knows that consciousness can't come from
material things, but we convince ourselves otherwise.

Ok, I'll make a sweeping unsupported statement too. Dualists have limited
imagination and flawed understanding of the nature of information and
computation as well as a penchant for magical thinking.

~~~
ca98am79
My comment wasn't about dualism, it was just about the idea that matter
doesn't create consciousness. Consciousness can create matter, and that is not
dualism.

And what is more magical thinking than the idea that consciousness can come
from a ball of matter? To me, that is much more the crazier idea

~~~
nhaehnle
Precedents for surprising meta-structures arising from the interaction of a
huge number of smaller objects with complex interactions are playing an
increasing role in science (think Wolfram's book, biology and the
understanding of the genome, and material science for example).

Discoveries of completely unknown fundamental laws of physics that have a
significant in-your-face and obvious impact on our everyday lives are playing
a decreasing role in science (depending on where you draw the line, one might
even argue that the last such discovery was made by Newton).

What you call crazy has become increasingly normal :)

~~~
ca98am79
Consciousness is not a "meta-structure" created from little pieces of things,
and anyone who thinks so is fooling themselves. Just take a moment to be
present and aware of your own consciousness to realize this. It IS crazy to
think that something as profound as consciousness comes from lots of legos put
together in just the right way. That sounds like magic to me. Everything makes
a lot more sense if you look at it the other way around - that consciousness
makes everything else. All the difficult problems become much easier. Here's a
blog post I wrote about it a while ago that got on the front page on Hacker
News: [http://hack.ly/articles/why-consciousness-may-not-come-
from-...](http://hack.ly/articles/why-consciousness-may-not-come-from-the-
brain/)

~~~
armitron
Science is the religion of the 21st century.

I think it's quite funny that the so-called hard problem of consciousness has
been with us for millennia, yet so few of us tackle it in the right way,
instead choosing to wait for others to give us all the answers or (at worst)
endlessly chewing and regurgitating the same useless conjectures and
pontifications.

Geeks and math nerds (and anyone who is seriously interested in tackling
consciousness) need to be doing more psychedelic drugs, I feel, and looking
_INWARDS_ , but how often does that happen?

Drugs are the _easy_ way there. There are other ways, but require _dedication_
and _commitment_ and possibly utter disregard for material concerns and
"consensus reality". As the ancient wise ones said regarding mysticism (direct
experiential knowledge), one needs to __know, will, dare and keep silent. __

The answers are here, the consciousness problem has been solved more than 2000
years ago, across cultures and civilizations. As Aleister Crowley once said,
"By doing certain things certain results will follow."

Yet very few feel the need to do anything these days.

------
zappo2938
A professor of philosophy and a student are talking.

Student: How do I know I exist?

Professor: Who's asking?

Student: I am

Sorry I couldn't resist. If you don't get it, search Cogito ergo sum.

~~~
laotzu
Professor: What do you mean when you say "I"?

------
amelius
(Note: completely serious post) Interestingly, when you have diarrhea, the
acidity makes your stool feel like it is hot instead of sour. So it seems
there is an acidity-sensor there that is connected to the temperature-sensing
part of the brain instead of the acidity-sensing part of the brain.

~~~
TeMPOraL
Wouldn't an acid on your skin feel like it's hot as well? (I never had such an
experience, so I don't know). I recall reading that "temperature sensors" in
the skin can be triggered by many things, not just temperature.

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hashkb
It's a decent (if roundabout) overview if you are interested in the subject
but have managed to completely avoid learning or reading anything about
consciousness thus far.

------
dkbrk
There are plenty of entirely worthwhile and interesting areas of research in
philosophy. This is not one of them.

It is entirely sufficient to understand that brains are composed of physical
elements - neurons and the like, that communicate with each other with little
electrical and chemical signals, and that this physical state evolves forwards
with time according to physical laws. I repeat, this is all that is required
to resolve _every single one_ of these supposed "problems" of consciousness.

We may not understand how a brain works in its entirety, but knowing that its
behaviour is entirely described by these physical pieces bounds our
understanding of its behaviour as a whole sufficiently that these problems are
trivially revealed to be specious nonsense.

As an analogy, I know that the microchip in my computer is built out of
transistors etched onto a silicon die. I have some knowledge about microchip
design, broadly speaking, and I know about things such as logic circuits,
latches and clock signals, but I don't possess a complete understanding of how
it functions. Still, knowing that it's just transistors bounds my
understanding of its behaviour. I know, for instance, that there's no extra-
physical magic pixie that makes it function. I don't wonder about the
subjective experience of the floating point unit, or about whether the L1
cache is _feeling_ or just _registering_ the data it stores, or whether it
would be _possible_ or just _concievable_ for a world to exist where an atom-
for-atom identical processor didn't actually _compute_ but just went through
the motions of moving about some little electrical impulses.

On a fundamental level, our brains are very much the same. The architecture is
nothing at all alike, for example: the clock speeds and signal propagation
rates are much lower, synaptic signals are at least partly analog, the brain
doesn't have anything remotely close to a uniform memory space, and it
continuously dynamically reconfigures itself through neuroplasticity. None of
this is relevant. I did not conclude there is not a magic pixie making making
my computer's CPU function because of my understanding of it's architecture
and overall design, I concluded it because I know it's made up of transistors,
and it's behaviour is entirely described by its transistors, and no matter how
hard you try you can't make a magic pixie out of transistors.

We have established that brains are made up of little physical pieces and obey
physical laws. It trivially follows that every piece of data that could
possible be referred to as part of our consciousness, every "feeling" or
"subjective experience" is just some pattern or another entirely described by
the physical state of the brain.

If you see some sort of problem with this, if you see some sort of
contradiction in the understanding that "you" are just a wetware-implemented
algorithm that is the end result of a rather convoluted process of natural
evolution and human development, that is a problem with your understanding not
with reality. There is no space in this picture for looking at some pattern of
neural impulses and asking whether it _feels_ ; you can answer that question
however you like, but with respect to reality that question is not even wrong.

David Chalmers would call this "materialism" or perhaps "physicalism". Once
you move past Solipsism and decide that reality actually exists, or that we
don't know that reality actually exists but it seems to so we might as well
assume it does for the sake of argument, then, though this is actually a
tautology, every physical thing physically exists. The problem with words such
as "materialism" and "physicalism" is that using the word implies things could
be any other way. There are abstract ideas, and there is reality - "that
which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away". While I might respect
a position such as solipsism as epistemologically valid, beyond that
particular loophole I cannot understand why philosophers who do not agree with
what is generally called "empirical materialism" are taken seriously.

~~~
sireat
What is "this" you speak of that is not worthy of research? Consciousness,
feelings, qualia?

It sure does not feel like a solved problem.

You do not consider there is such a thing as "hard problem"?

Sure, one can subscribe to the view that qualia is just this accident of
evolution in a purely physical world, an emergent behavior of a bunch of
neurons firing in unison if you will.

Even then it seems there is a lot of room for debate.

I(ha!) thought(double ha!) the article was quite good at showing the various
viewpoints and progress through time(triple ha!).

------
weatherlight
Philosophy is the criticism of categories for better or for worse.

------
andyjohnson0
I stopped when I got to _" According to Maxwell’s equations, blue is ripples
of electromagnetism with a wavelength of between 450 and 495 nanometres."_

~~~
ThomPete
I have had people stop on some essay I wrote too, come here and say "i stopped
reading after...".

But because they didn't read it through they didn't read the part were I was
addressing what I wrote.

I find this tendency pretty counter-productive to learning anything at all.
"Oh there was something that is wrong" then I don't want to finalize it. I
wonder if it says something about our generation or whether this is something
thats always been at play (like older people who wouldn't take a punker
serious because of how they look)

I don't want to single you out but I just don't understand this approach to
reading things. Care to comment?

~~~
shhhh-
If you don't mind my interjecting..

Between link-sharing sites like this one, print and digital publications, and
never ending ad campaigns masquerading as blogs and "relate-to-me!" emails,
most of us are inundated with the specious ideas and arguments of people whose
reliability can be difficult to assess. A simple heuristic is stop reading if
the author appears to not be grounded in the empirical tradition. Which,
unfortunately, most writers aren't.

~~~
ThomPete
So basically you mostly don't read anything since most writers aren't?

Not all valuable perspectives follows some strictly logical path to get to
it's conclusions. And not all conclusions make high claims of validity. Some
are just exploring potentials.

Newton was right about many things but wrong about others.

That doesn't mean his contributions aren't valuable. Imagine reading him today
efter relativity and QM and then applying this approach.

~~~
TeMPOraL
It's not that. Personally, I usually like to give the author a chance so in
such cases I just start skimming instead of stopping reading altogether. But
this quoted part suggests that the author doesn't understand how categories
and naming things work, which is very damning in an article about
consciousness.

~~~
aarpmcgee
Whether that is what it suggests to you does not mean, necessarily, that it
suggests that to anyone else. To me, it suggests that the author may have been
a little hasty, but I would by no means take it to mean that the author
doesn't understand categories... that seems like a leap to me. Of course, my
presumption might also be seen as a leap.

Might be just me, but being that this article in total is _not_ about a
scientific understanding of the color blue but rather about consciousness, it
seems reasonable to me to read on.

------
shhhh-
Don't bother. Folly.

~~~
aarpmcgee
I'll just take your word for it then.

