
A Theory of Consciousness Can Help Build a Theory of Everything - dnetesn
http://nautil.us/issue/47/consciousness/a-theory-of-consciousness-can-help-build-a-theory-of-everything
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psyc
Please, no more disdain for people's ideas and hypotheses about a fundamental
topic that nobody has an answer for yet.

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lend000
Some people do have an answer for it... Schmidhuber's answer: consciousness is
a byproduct of data compression.

Anyway, there's certainly no evidence to suggest that consciousness requires
anything more than our current understanding of physical laws. This article
was pretty interesting with its topical exploration of self organization and a
more math-based approach, but once it got into quantum physics it started to
delve into the realm of pure conjecture and pseudo-science.

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RivieraKid
Well, people have lot of different answers, some of them pretty ridiculous.

One fundamental reason why this is such a controversial and confusing topic
with a wide range of opinions is that consciousness is meta-physical
phenomenon. I.e. it's out of the scope of science in a way. But the concept
that there's something beyond science is completely unintuitive to many people
(by "beyond science" I obviously don't mean BS like spirituality etc., it's
from a purely rational perspective). So trying to understand consciousness
with science only will inevitably fail.

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maverick_iceman
Why is it beyond the scope of science? No experiments have shown that
consciousness can violate the laws of physics and steady progress has been
made in explaining consciousness from neuroscience.

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placebo
You are referring to the soft problem of consciousness, which is not what the
argument is about. I too am convinced that the hard problem of consciousness
is beyond the scope of science. It is beyond science not in the sense that it
violates the laws of physics but because when you get right down to it, your
consciousness is the only "real" thing that you can ever know about.
Everything else you supposedly "know" \- every concept, every derived "laws"
of physics are thought models which you only know by being conscious of them.
A very crude analogy would be to say that consciousness is like a camera that
enables science to be done, but the camera can't take a picture of itself.

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AnimalMuppet
The camera can in fact take a picture of itself - if there's a mirror. (But it
can never take a picture of the mirror - just what the mirror reflects!)

So, what would be a mirror for consciousness? Is there one?

~~~
lefnire
AI

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daliwali
A variation of this already exists, called the Cognitive-Theoretic Model of
the Universe (CTMU) [0]. It is dismissed by critics as not being based on
empirical methods or pure reason, which is what it's getting at: science isn't
the answer to everything. Some questions can't be answered by reason alone,
mind-body dualism for example.

[0] [http://www.ctmu.org/](http://www.ctmu.org/)

~~~
castle-bravo
Science can't express all of the truths about the universe. Scientists know
this. What science does provide is a reliable framework for finding out some
truths about the universe. So far the science approach has been very
successful. Art projects like CMTU do not provide any such framework. While
entertaining, the information presented is of little to no use. At worst,
pseudoscientific presentations like CMTU are used to persuade certain people
that the scientific establishment is engaged in a conspiracy to mislead and
defraud the public.

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daliwali
I think abstract, non-empirical knowledge can be useful. For example, all of
mathematics. It is unreasonably effective at modeling nature, there is no
reason why nature must adhere to abstract mathematics. For example the
invention of the imaginary number preceded its explanation of alternating
currents.

I disagree with the claim that "pseudo-science" as you call it is used to
discredit the establishment. Rather it is exactly the opposite, the
establishment uses the label to discredit outlandish ideas. Every scientific
theory starts off as hypothesis and maintains falsifiability, to accept it as
dogma is worse than not exploring other ideas.

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fsiefken
I'm intruiged by Kastrup's view on the mind-body problem. He explains it in
very a recent paper: "An Ontological Solution to the Mind-Body Problem"
[http://www.mdpi.com/2409-9287/2/2/10](http://www.mdpi.com/2409-9287/2/2/10)

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henearkr
Am I the only one thinking this approach should allow to address the
conditions in which a social mind could emerge in societies of individuals?
Including humans, or more likely slightly modified versions of humans.

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nsxwolf
It seems to me that it is not possible for science to explain to me why I am
me and not someone else - why I was born on this planet and not some other,
why the date I was and not some other.

That's simply outside the reach of science. Science is not a tool that can
answer that question. I'm sure someone will tell me that my question is
meaningless to begin with - ironically I think the answers to the questions
scientists seek about consciousness are permanently beyond the event horizon
of that very meaningless they accuse my question of.

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henearkr
A variation along the lines of an Anthropic Principle would be like: \- why am
I born a Saturday? \- because if you were born a Monday your question would
have been different accordingly

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henearkr
And it is also equivalent to considering all these realities coexisting in
parallel universes. It kinds of "brings back the missing symmetry" of the
situation.

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tnzn
Enacting anyone ?

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kneel
Please no, no more 'Theory of Consciousness' pseudoscience.

If we can't even get a solid consensus on what consciousness is we're not
going to have a theory for it anytime soon.

Every time this comes up we have a split between actual neuroscience and
everyone's subjective interpretation of consciousness.

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cscurmudgeon
> If we can't even get a solid consensus on what consciousness

That is what the damn problem is.

This is like saying since we don't understand gravity full, we should not
study it.

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monocasa
We come come up with a test that detects the presence of gravity. Can we do
the same with consciousness?

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lioeters
That's an interesting question, and I think it reveals something about the
difficulty of studying consciousness strictly in a "scientific" way, i.e.,
based on experimental results, empirical evidence, falsifiability,
reproducibility..

How can we test the existence of a wholly subjective/interior experience? This
seems to relate to, for example, if it's possible to measure and quantify pain
(or pleasure I suppose) objectively.

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maverick_iceman
Scott Aaronson discussed Integrated Information Theory in 2014. His conclusion
was that it is a failed research program. [1][2][3]

[1][http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=1799](http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=1799)

[2][http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=1823](http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=1823)

[3][http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=1893](http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=1893)

~~~
svara
I just want to say that this is probably the best online discussion I have
ever seen. Scott and Giulio respond to each other in clear, well thought out,
detailed posts. Christof Koch and David Chalmers chime in in the comments
section of Scotts blog, and all of the commenters there really try to
contribute something substantive to the discussion.

I'm super impressed, as in, the internet is actually better than I thought! ;)
I would really recommend to anyone interested in that discussion to take the
3-4 h it takes to read through it all.

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behnamoh
Reminds me of Sheldon and Amy discussing the same issue in "the Big Bang
Theory" TV show!

