"I would rather say that consciousness is not what we generally think it is. It is not direct awareness of our inner world of thoughts and judgments but a highly inferential process that only gives us the impression of immediacy."
Whatever it is you still can't explain it. End of story.
Precisely. Much of what is described as theories of consciousness describe the mechanics of consciousness, but not the topology of it. It is like describing how the parts of a machine interact, when we don't know what the parts actually are made of, or how they are shaped, or how they function or if they even exist.
I can’t explain it but I do know that if I’m blocking my feelings (for whatever reason) I lose access to the meaning of things. Meaning and interpretation in my mind seem to resonate with my surroundings just by simply coming back to the feelings in my body.
The article wasn't about this, but the headline reminded me of a conundrum I first encountered while reading "Permutation City."
The protagonist considers how consciousness can be simulated. Simulated entities experience subjective time at the same rate, whether their mental faculties are computed in real-time, or if they are only computed once a day (which would result in the "outside world" speeding by them, but their subjective perception of the flow of time never changes).
The protagonist then considers how the same computations could be done on an abacus by hand, over a long enough time period. The question is then, are the mechanisms that compute and result in our own consciousness that different from had someone done it on a computer, or even on an abacus?
This seems reasonable at first glance... The brain often makes an observation that takes too long, and then pretends it knew the results all along. Brain scans have shown that the decision to do X has happened way before the awareness of action X has been detected - mostly due to a 'society of mind'.
I don't think the assertions are all correct, in all cases however.
I do think we spend much of our time on a kind of autopilot, where (the bit of your mind we identify as you) is essentially a passenger. Our actual conscious thought is probably much smaller than we'd like to believe.
I'm looking forward to @bencollier49's thoughts/blogpost.
Alternatively, ALL matter is conscious. And interstellar motion is guided not by gravity and dark matter interactions. But by volition. With young stars swerving between trajectories by minded emissions of directional jets ;)
This comes on the heels of the Free Will debate in neuroscience. Where some observers decipher the lighting up of a cluster of neurons in an fMRI machine milliseconds before an action takes place as proof of external determinism. Or perhaps it is conspiratorial prep for the coming age of state sponsored brain implants and hive mind mass control.
Regardless debates such as these will become moot once in vivo science of mind is achieved, perhaps not until century's end. The more interesting questions in neuroscience tend to be of the form: where do creativity and inspiration come from? We've all had the experience of focused concentration on a puzzling problem. Only to have the solution, fully formed, pop into our heads like a bolt of lighting. Is there some way to fertilize this process? To favor the probability of discovery.
I always figured that thought occurs by reference.
Like, rather than creating a thought the thought is already there, and then we refer to it.
A metaphor : You are in a dark room with a flashlight. You direct your flashlight at a flowerpot. Suddenly you see a flowerpot. But you did not create the flowerpot it just suddenly became visible.
In my model here the process of thinking consists of a series of changes of reference. A series of redirections of attention. You observe a thought. You respond to that thought by directing your attention (much like directing the beam of a flashlight) at another thought. And so on. An endless chain.
Note that I am a longtime meditation enthusiast so my perspective is abnormal and weird.
That's not a metaphor, that's what actually happens.
In order to see a flowerpot your brain has to have a way to connect the image to something internal. Our brain knows how to do semiotics without our being conscious of it.
So what we think of as "consciousness" is just our brain processing information that has a sensory manifestation. Light goes into our eyes, is processed by our brain, and then we know what's in the room.
But if the lights are turned off in the room, we still now what's in the room.
And we call this capability "consciousness" but that's not what it is.
The difficulty is that any conversation about this topic takes on the character of a Buddhist riddle. No one knows how to take the next step.
we can't direct our thoughts, they could be seen as streams of information reacting with information that we have previously encountered which affected our processing pathways.
I was disappointed to not see any discussion of the thinking that might plausibly be concious. Yes, most of our "thinking" is instinctive. But we also have Kannehman's "System 2"[1] which does seem to correspond to what we would normally consider conscious though. We may "think much less than we think we think" but that doesn't mean we don't think at all.
This does, in a sense, all boil down to semantics. Poeple can argue for hours about whether a tree falling in the forest with no one to hear makes a sound without realizing that they're arguing over the definition of "sound". But the notion of conscious versus unconscious decisions is a useful one, so given that we have multiple possible scientific definitions of "consciousness" that correspond to our traditional conception we might as well pick the one that's most useful.
"The first [theory of the nature of a conscious mind] is what is called the Global Workspace Theory, which is associated with neuroscientists Stanislas Dehaene and Bernard Baars. Their theory states that to be considered conscious a mental state must be among the contents of working memory (the “user interface” of our minds) and thereby be available to other mental functions, such as decision-making and verbalization"
This seems like an excellent article. Whether you agree with the author or not, he positions his ideas relative to other thinkers who are positing broadly verifiable ideas about the nature of consciousness, a subject that can easily veer off to irrefutable subjective claims.
It certainly made me think about consciousness being a meta function looking at the subconscious result. So yeah GEB :)
It may well be the initial decision is subconscious and although we then (sometimes) inspect it in a meta/conscious way (and recursively if we are thinking hard), the article is saying we shouldn't confuse the meta process with the original thought. That original thought is derived in an unknown way. Its akin to the subsymbolic vs symbolic discussion elsewhere on HN in my opinion. The unconscious thought being the ANN (subsymbolic part) the meta function examining that thought and procesing it further being the symbolic part(consciousness).
Misleading clickbait title. The interviewee is not at all denying the hard problem of consciousness, he's saying that our conscious experiences are more disconnected, less informationally dense and that we have less insight into our experiences than we believe.
This is one of the more annoying things editors do to other people's writing.
The interviewee, Peter Carruthers, makes it clear the idea of consciousness that he is addressing and claiming are false. Not all discussion around consciousness necessarily references "The Hard Problem". I suspect David Chalmers and his ideas are more popular in popular discussions than among other philosophers of the mind.
This is the latest approach to science's complete inability to solve the hard problem of consciousness. Just declare that it doesn't exist. I think it's rather pitiful, to be honest.
I was pretty riled up too when I read the headline, but after reading the article, I think the interviewee actually has a much more benign view that it seems. He does not appear to deny the hard problem and indeed the domain of his claims appear to not even intersect with the hard problem in any real sense.
It appears to me (correct me if I'm wrong), that he is simply claiming that we believe we are having much more rich conscious experiences than we actually are, and that we are often mislead or mistaken about the character of our experience. As a meditator, I can corroborate these claims.
None of these claims deny the existence of subjective experience itself which is the basis of the hard problem. He's merely saying that our conscious experiences are much more disconnected, less informationally dense and less orderly than we believe.
>He's merely saying that our conscious experiences are much more disconnected, less informationally dense and less orderly than we believe.
If there was only one particle in the universe, it wouldn't have a height. I disagree that the average person has the capacity to be wrong about their consciousness, because without another one to compare it against they have no way to form opinions about it.
A person can't be wrong that they have consciousness, but they can be mistaken about about the character of their conscious experiences.
We tend to think that we have a very continuous constant stream of attention and thought but in reality if you learn to pay attention, you'll see that your mind is pretty erratic and experience is not at all like your memories tend to represent.
I don't think most people have a belief about how continuous or erratic their consciousness is, because the only time words are used to describe things is when you are distinguishing between more than one thing.
I think it’s more of a misleading title, combined with the usual meandering style that philosophers have. What he’s basically saying is that we consciously experience the outputs of a number of expert systems: those responsible for seeing, hearing, selecting what should be attended to, and that even thought is a kind of expert system to which we have no internal access. We know that we think, that we see and hear, but we don’t know the details of how it happens, nor do we experience the details of this processing.
It’s not really very revolutionary, we already know this and it seems obvious when pointed out, it also does nothing to explain how experience of those outputs arises, or what it is.
any thought that we encounter are simply internal reactions to stimuli of various sorts encountering information we have previously processed/learned. what this article is saying is that we do not control these as is normally believed, we are more of a bystander than anything.
This really feels like a knee-jerk reaction to the article's headline instead of any sort of argument as to why you think it may be wrong or what pieces of the interview you disagree with.
You can’t explain something in terms of itself. Obviously at some point any process has to be explained in terms of lower level processes that don’t share the characteristics of the higher level process. The cop-out is in refusing to accept that, which results in circular arguments. Like any magic trick (or computer system), once you explain how it works, you’re saying the “magic” doesn’t exist. Consciousness is no exception.
But that's not what's going on here. This is like saying Microsoft Word doesn't exist because I can't see it if I look at the electrons in the computer. Or can't abstract it from there. Or possibly even who wrote the program. No, just "It doesn't exist", or "It's an illusion".
The concept of conscious thought was only created with subjective observation, people had simply assumed what their experience was. We still don't have solid evidence one way or the other but the evidence we do have seems to be pointing towards it being an illusion.
Most scientific methodology tries very hard to exclude subjective experience by design. Well, if you do that then of course there will be a lack of evidence for subjective phenomena!
Just in case you're tempted to downplay science's blind spot here, consider that this also means science has next to nothing to say about 99+% of your life.
If you take a reductionist stance in this domain you actually have to philosophically ground it in a way that you don't have to worry about too much in other fields of study. Otherwise you'll end up with an embarrassing phlogistic theory of consciousness.
If by consciousness you mean what everybody means by consciousness there are no well-founded claims about it because it's not observable. If you want to redefine consciousness to mean desk lamps, then I strongly disagree with the conclusion that consciousness doesn't exist because I have a desk lamp right here.
The author admits that what he's really doing is playing games with definitions, and more interestingly, exploring the question of what conciousness is. To try and exploit shock value via tabloid-style meaning twisting is unworthy of the subject matter.
Unfortunately the vast majority of Academic Philosophers disagree with you. Thoughts obviously exist but the idea that you are in control of what you think about is patently false. Take a look at modern stances on Free Will if you doubt that.
Free will in this interpretation is making binary choices to manifest thought forms or not, and consciousness would be having the machinery to interpret thought and exercise free will.
Not sure I agree with this. I think most people imagine that they have a landscape of possible choices or thoughts in front of them and they have some agency to maneuver through that landscape and modern research and even simple meditation will reveal that this is simply an illusion. I don't really want to chime in on the nature of Consciousness though.
My thought is that the binary “do not manifest” decision could request delivery of a new set of similar thought forms which could then be manifest. There could be several types of thought forms that let us have the illusion that we are willing in related thoughts. Like an old iPod, perhaps. Consciousness is the most fun topic to speculate about, says the Buddha!
Indeed, that's certainly one way to interpret the lack of free will. You might be inclined to join the Compatibilist camp, which I find intellectually lacking but many people are more comfortable with than raw determinism. Whichever stance you take its virtually certain that Libertarian Free Will, the kind of free will 99% of people imagine when they think about the idea, does not exist.
"I would rather say that consciousness is not what we generally think it is. It is not direct awareness of our inner world of thoughts and judgments but a highly inferential process that only gives us the impression of immediacy."
Whatever it is you still can't explain it. End of story.