What If Consciousness Comes First?

The real answer is that we don&#x27;t yet know enough about how the brain works to work effectively on this problem. We don&#x27;t know what questions to ask or how to break down the problem into smaller problems.<p>We may get there. Read something about how vision works from a century ago, when nobody had a clue. The first real progress came from &quot;What the Frog&#x27;s Eye Tells the Frog&#x27;s Brain&quot; (1959).[1] That was the beginning of understanding visual perception, and the very early days of neural network technology. Now we have lots of systems doing visual perception moderately well. There&#x27;s been real progress.<p>(I went through Stanford CS at the peak of the 1980s expert system boom. Back then, people there were way too much into asking questions like this. &quot;Does a rock have intentions?&quot; was an exam question. The &quot;AI winter&quot; followed. AI finally got unstuck 20 years later when the machine learning people and their &quot;shut up and calculate&quot; approach started working.)<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hearingbrain.org&#x2F;docs&#x2F;letvin_ieee_1959.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hearingbrain.org&#x2F;docs&#x2F;letvin_ieee_1959.pdf</a>

The idea that consciousness comes first has been known as in eastern philosophy as non-dualism (advaita vedanta) -- everything is consciousness. The basic idea is that it is impossible to experience anything outside of our consciousness--thus any assumption there is something outside of consciousness is just that -- an assumption or belief. We can theorize, we can argue, but it will always remain a belief, because it&#x27;s not possible to experience anything outside of consciousness.<p>I&#x27;d like to share Rupert Spira, a modern non-dualist teacher that holds this view-point. Here is one video in which he explains the consciousness-first approach to someone, a scientist, who holds to the materialist approach: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=Qgcfa0LFKXc" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=Qgcfa0LFKXc</a><p>Perhaps someone will find it interesting and peruse some of his other videos, which I find very enlightening.

I thought it was fascinating as I read the thesis statement that over two hundred years later we still haven&#x27;t left Immanuel Kant&#x27;s orbit. The author ended the article citing Kant&#x27;s proposition that space and time belong to the mind rather than as properties of external reality however Kant directly answers her question, paraphrasing, &quot;What is it that lends perception the power of perceiving&quot;, to which Kant answers with a technical term, original apperception, which more concretely means that the <i>structure</i> of consciousness, no matter its belonging to subjectivity (so-called empirical apperception, your spontaneous sense of selfhood), is itself objective (those terms are actually one in Kant, universal === necessary). There are readings of Kant to go further and suggest that math, by extension, must be the descriptor of anything that can exist therefore.<p>Interesting enough, the grandfather of the modern Left, Michel Foucault, spent a considerable amount of his career trying to dislodge Kant&#x27;s claim before coming upon the realization that power informs our perceptions.

This article begs the question of our conciousness not being a physical process which is cool I guess If your peddling thoughts from a dualist from over a century ago. I still have no reason however, not to believe our conciousness doesn&#x27;t arise from the physical configuration and other processes therein related. To paraphrase &quot;Science cant talk about this purely in physic terms.&quot; No, Science simply hasn&#x27;t FOUND the way to talk about it in physical terms which I personally believe in time we will. To be absolutely fair, as you may have noticed I&#x27;m in the camp of people who think Kant is largely garbage so I&#x27;m have a natural bias against works using his thought on the matter.

The building blocks of this universe are &quot;things&quot; vibrating. That is all I know.<p>Consciousness is a very tricky problem. I often question what happens when a man loses his &quot;mind&quot;. Is the being now just a machine with stored memory which responds to stimuli?<p>What happens when a person loses his memory? What role does consciousness play in this scenario?<p>How do we let split personality disorder and consciousness to play together?<p>Also, I look around and see the geometry of flowers and seeds. Geometry that emanates from the universe. Everything that looks chaotic at one level becomes extremely beautiful and organized at another.<p>Also, I see that everything is terribly interconnected. If we think deeply enough we can easily see that a stone lying outside and us are all the same as far as building blocks are concerned. The stone is not an unnecessary object, but our existence and the stone&#x27;s existence are inextricable.<p>The universe, whatever is visible to me, is absolutely too grand and too well engineered to not have some sort of intelligence working behind it.<p>I do not know.

I understand the point the author wants to make, but I think they fail to make it.<p>As an example, the idea that &quot;there could be a mind that eats food but doesn&#x27;t taste it&quot; is silly. We were always going to evolve a way to &quot;scan&quot; food for it&#x27;s properties. It just makes evolutionary sense. The more information the better. Not to mention the reward aspect (there is some reward for doing everything that contributes to survivial). Of course food tastes good.<p>Another example the author uses &quot;red looks red&quot; is equally unconsidered. It&#x27;s a mental representation of light. There are evolutionary reasons for being able to distinguish colors, and they have to be represented mentally somehow. Why doesn&#x27;t it look like blue? Who cares? All that matters is that it has a distinct representation.<p>Also in the article, the &quot;why do rotten eggs smell bad&quot; example... Because sulfurous compounds are the result of the metabolic processes of various bacteria. Because those bacteria are present in rotting things, which can cause illness, we have evolved to find them repellent.<p>Why are my experiences different from others? Because that&#x27;s just how biological organisms beyond a certain complexity work. No two are alike.<p>A similarly obvious explanation exists for every example in the article. I see no compelling case that experience cannot be described through biological processes or that consciousness didn&#x27;t arise from complexity.<p>I&#x27;m not saying there aren&#x27;t interesting mysteries where consciousness is concerned, just that this article seems to completely fail to explore them.

It seems to me that the properties of consciousness would naturally follow from any generally intelligent system. An intelligent agent must be aware of phenomena in its environment, it must be able to distinguish phenomena (qualia), its experience is subjective to the extent of the limitations of its connectivity.<p>&gt; The problem is that there could conceivably be brains that perform all the same sensory and decision-making functions as ours but in which there is no conscious experience.<p>I think before this can be said to be a problem, it should be explained how such a brain (with human-like intelligence) can exist without mechanisms corresponding to the properties of consciousness.

Hold up, Is this thread being inundated by a religious group or something?<p>Where is the rational thought behind this consciousness discussion? If all of you &quot;critical thinkers&quot; are really responding with &quot;You just don&#x27;t want to accept that consciousness can&#x27;t be explained with science&quot; then I have lost my last remaining bit of hope in humanity&#x27;s intelligence.

Sure maybe from a philosophical point of argument consciousness trumps all and physical existence and objective external reality should be viewed through that lense. But every single particle has a worldline tracing back to the Big Bang, where there were no conscious beings present yet. Only until the universe cooled and became less dense did consciousness become possible. So can consciousness really claim supremacy over external reality. To do so would require retroactivity or bootstrapping. Unless you accept the idea of a timeless universe where no point on a worldline (or collection of worldlines) is privileged, and <i>now</i> is a statistical reality more than anything in that there are more collections of worldlines with consciousnesses when the universe is relatively evenly made up of dark energy and regular matter+energy (highest amount observers compared to much closer or much further from Big Bang).<p>The flow of time may be a subjective illusion.

This is sad. We have good functional accounts of consciousness (Global Workspace theory [0], Attention Schema theory [1], recent robotics work on self-attention [2]). These explain much of the specific phenomenology of conscious experience. However Rawlette clearly is completely unfamiliar with this extensive and deeply empirical literature.<p>&quot;Armchair philosophy&quot; like this still gets published way too much, and is given way too much respect. Rawlette, typical of this genre, believes that &quot;conceivability&quot;, thought experiments independent of empirical facts, and verbal theorizing can justify beliefs more strongly than actual research.<p>For good philosophy in this domain, read people like Andy Clark [3].<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Global_workspace_theory" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Global_workspace_theory</a><p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Attention_schema_theory" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Attention_schema_theory</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.quantamagazine.org&#x2F;hod-lipson-is-building-self-aware-robots-20190711&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.quantamagazine.org&#x2F;hod-lipson-is-building-self-a...</a><p>[3] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Andy_Clark" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Andy_Clark</a>

The most interesting view of consciousness that really changed my thoughts on it was from Wegner&#x27;s &quot;The Illusion of Conscious Will&quot;. He basically argues this:<p>We have an agent-based model to understand the behavior of certain things in the world. When we see a cat chase a mouse we assume that the cat as an agent which has a goal which is to catch the mouse. That is we imagine the intentions of the cat (and the mouse) to better predict what will happen next. This is just a mental model, but it&#x27;s different than the causal model we use to predict where a baseball will land when you throw it.<p>We apply this model to all sorts of things because it is useful to help predict behavior. That is we imagine conscious intention as a tool to understand things in our world.<p>The catch is that when we observer our own mind at work... we apply this same model. This is a weird moment where we try to imagine that we have conscious intentions, but since it is own on selves we are watching this creates the illusion of conscious will.<p>Whether or not Wegner really nails it, I become increasingly suspicious that consciousness is far less special and much more of a trick than we believe it is. But because that illusion is tied to who we &quot;are&quot; we have a very hard time letting go (of course this idea goes back to Buddha and earlier)

Maybe I&#x27;m just dumb, but I have a problem taking anything meaningful from that article. There&#x27;s an ontological problem in defining consciousness in terms of observations - this is circular because we don&#x27;t have a meaningful starting point so we should throw it all away and... then what?

&gt; The problem is that there could conceivably be brains that perform all the same sensory and decision-making functions as ours but in which there is no conscious experience. That is, there could be brains that react as though sad but that don’t feel sadness, brains that can discriminate between wavelengths of light but that don’t see red or yellow or blue or any other color, brains that direct their bodies to eat certain foods but that don’t taste them. So why is there nevertheless something that it’s like to be us?<p>I don&#x27;t think so. What even is this &quot;conscious experience&quot;? I hypothesize that it&#x27;s an illusion. A sufficiently complex robot would indeed have the same &quot;conscious experience&quot;. Qualia is nothing more than complex arrangements of molecules in our brains, it&#x27;s an abstraction, not something fundamental to the universe. Maybe stars and planets too have some sort of rudimentary &quot;conscious experience&quot;.<p>I can&#x27;t prove this, but you can&#x27;t prove that you have &quot;conscious experience&quot; either.<p>&gt; that no physical property or set of properties can explain what it’s like to be conscious.<p>I think that it can be explained but we just don&#x27;t have enough knowledge of the internal workings of the brain yet.<p>For some reason I get really exalted when people such as the author disagree with me on this, of all topics. I don&#x27;t know what it is, maybe it makes me angry that people <i>don&#x27;t realize</i> it. I know that sounds really arrogant (specially when author has a phd in philosophy), and I might be wrong and look like an idiot, but I can&#x27;t control this feeling. I feel the same way a teenage atheist feels when he hears a religious person speak about god (I know this because I was that teenage atheist).

For anyone curious for more, the article surprisingly doesn&#x27;t bother to mention the philosophical name given to this view:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Idealism" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Idealism</a><p>&gt; <i>&quot;In philosophy, idealism is the group of metaphysical philosophies that assert that reality, or reality as humans can know it, is fundamentally mental, mentally constructed, or otherwise immaterial. Epistemologically, idealism manifests as a skepticism about the possibility of knowing any mind-independent thing. In contrast to materialism, idealism asserts the primacy of consciousness as the origin and prerequisite of material phenomena. According to this view, consciousness exists before and is the pre-condition of material existence. Consciousness creates and determines the material and not vice versa.&quot;</i>

One assumption people often take for granted about consciousness is that everyone is conscious. I agree we should operate under that assumption for the purposes of making ethical decisions, but I think we should challenge it for the purpose of trying to understand consciousness better. What if philosophical zombies aren&#x27;t just a hypothetical thought experiment, what if some people are conscious and others only pretend to be conscious? Is there some particular event that triggers consciousness?<p>Lacan thought that consciousness is triggered by looking in a mirror (or something equivalent to a mirror). If someone was carefully raised without the ability to look in a mirror, see their own shadow, hear their own voice, etc., would they never become conscious? How could you tell?<p>What if consciousness is triggered by something totally unexpected, like: circumcision; submersion baptism; chicken pox; or some particular bacteria in my gut? I can find someone who never had chicken pox and ask them if they&#x27;re conscious, but how do I know if they&#x27;re answering truthfully?<p>Everyone has a big incentive to profess consciousness, because anyone who professed non-consciousness would be in danger of losing the privileges and protections which society grants to conscious people.

For those interested in potential viable ontologies other than reductive physicalism, I encourage you to read the works of Bernardo Kastrup. His most recent book, The Idea of the World, is well-argued and very interesting.

Two physicists and a philosopher recently published a similar article that makes this point even more cogently, in my opinion.<p>“The blind spot of science is the neglect of lived experience” <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;aeon.co&#x2F;essays&#x2F;the-blind-spot-of-science-is-the-neglect-of-lived-experience" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;aeon.co&#x2F;essays&#x2F;the-blind-spot-of-science-is-the-negl...</a>

<i>The problem is that there could conceivably be brains that perform all the same sensory and decision-making functions as ours but in which there is no conscious experience. </i><p>That&#x27;s really not true. In Neural Correlates of Consciousness research there are two very important things people can only do for experiences that they&#x27;re consciously aware of: remember then and communicate about them. Someone with blindsight can pick up and apple in front of them as well as a sighted person. But give them a blindfold and they won&#x27;t be able to reach for the spot their eyes once knew the apple was located in. And they can&#x27;t tell anyone what is in front of them either.

I don&#x27;t know if this &quot;problem&quot; can ever truly be &quot;solved&quot; as there&#x27;s not really a way to prove there to be a difference between something truly &quot;feeling&quot; emotions compared to faking it convincingly. I have to wonder at what point the difference becomes moot, a sort of Chinese room for emotions. I tend to lean towards solipsism when it comes to this kind of stuff, though. Does the difference actually matter?

I personally feel that some of the answers regarding consciousness and sentience may be found when we finally destigmatize psychedelics and allow structured, ethical studies and real analysis. Anyone who has had a really profound psychedelic experience knows that there is <i>something</i> more to our minds than we all realize. We barely know how it works, and it can&#x27;t easily even really be explained to one who hasn&#x27;t had a psychedelic experience.<p>Note that I am not advocating reckless exploration of psychedelics. A person needs to do a lot of research and self-reflection to put themselves in the mindset to even consider tripping. But for those who can handle them, there are paths to self-growth and self-repair that are unmatched in modern medicine.<p>Personally, my (unfounded but by personal experience) belief is that what we know as consciousness or sentience is driven by a specific balance of psychoactive substances that are naturally metabolized in the body and brain, and many neurological disorders are due to an imbalance in those substances. DMT helped me take great steps towards fighting ADHD

The only sane and productive model of consciousness I&#x27;ve encountered (and I&#x27;ve been around a bunch through growing up in the Transcendental Meditation movement) has been the one described in Hofstadter&#x27;s works, such as Godel, Escher, Bach.<p>He talks about consciousness as an epiphenomenon, where the pattern itself is what makes something conscious, rather than some magical property that some matter has and other matter doesn&#x27;t. With mathematical precision, he describes how consciousness relates to the ability to self-reference and how this relates to fundamental paradoxes in various fields such as the Halting Problem, Godel&#x27;s Incompleteness Theorems, Russel&#x27;s Paradox, and the works of Escher and Bach.<p>This line of thinking brings up some very interesting moral questions: What is it about life that makes us want to value it? Why do we have the notion of &quot;higher&quot; and &quot;lower&quot; life forms and value some species more highly than others? If we created a sufficiently advanced AI, that gave all the appearances of having feelings, a sense of self preservation, an identity, and desires, would it be immoral to unplug it or control its freedoms? What if it felt and understood even more than a human? Would its needs supersede our own?<p>Anyway, I highly recommend that book, GEB. It has made most other philosophizing about consciousness seem flat to me.

This thread is depressingly chock-full of people who just do not understand the argument being made here. The same tired old counterarguments of &quot;it&#x27;s just like elan vitale was before we understood biology&quot; are being trotted out again and again, with no attempt at understanding how flawed that talking point is (and has been for years).

I think the problem is looked at in a confusing way. On one hand, we use a scientific&#x2F;empiric analysis of the success of science to explain consciousness on the other we are ready to admit science may not be able to explain it but we don&#x27;t apply the same rigorous mechanism to test the non-scientific explanation of it. I also think we are not seeing the forest from the trees and are too hooked up to some kind of &quot;magic explanation&quot; of consciousness that is defined by having people explain their experience.<p>I&#x27;m a strong proponent of the &quot;what acts like a duck is a duck&quot; principle. If in the future we manage to create machines which will be, for a very large statistical value, indistinguishable from a human in terms of behavior (that is, make the Turing test seem like a childish joke), is it fair then to say that those are just machines made to emulate our behavior and don&#x27;t really reflect &quot;real&quot; consciousness? Why is it fair to define consciousness just as something that humans and personal human experience can decide?<p>Yes, machines may never have human consciousness, but if for all intends and purposes they behave as having one, then they have one, in my opinion.<p>Also, saying that humans are more than biochemical machines is the same like saying that my home gaming PC is more than wires and electrons. Yes, the experience enabled by the software running on those wires and electrons goes beyond just the physical support for it but that doesn&#x27;t mean, that at the end of the day it isn&#x27;t just wires and electrons.

&gt;It’s as though someone created a very elaborate spreadsheet and carefully defined how the values in every cell would be related to the values in all of the other cells. However, if no one enters a definite value for at least one of these cells, then none of the cells will have values.<p>Does it sound to anyone else like the author would benefit tremendously from learning the Lambda Calculus? It seems to me to be a disproof of the authors contention that a &#x27;definite value&#x27; is needed at some point.

I&#x27;ve also heard that it could be that everything that exists, is &quot;potentially conscious&quot;, such that if it is connected in such a way where it can experience and actuate, it can become aware of it&#x27;s own essence, and that consciousness is just the first person experience of the universe itself. That idea is interesting but it doesn&#x27;t quite solve anything, since the harder problem is figuring out exactly how the brain awakens it.

I&#x27;ve wondered this myself-- what if instead of the brain growing the create consciousness, it grows to receive consciousness? Like a tree growing to receive light.

&gt;The problem is that there could conceivably be brains that perform all the same sensory and decision-making functions as ours but in which there is no conscious experience. That is, there could be brains that react as though sad but that don’t feel sadness, brains that can discriminate between wavelengths of light but that don’t see red or yellow or blue<p>That&#x27;s an assertion I believe to not be so obvious it can be assumed to be correct with no argument to the contrary. If you can&#x27;t define consciousness why do you believe it exists independent of these other systems and that these other systems exist independent of it? The study of consciousness is absolutely full of non-falsifiable claims like this. We decide apes and dogs and frogs and ants are not sapient but that is an outside observation. It may be as erroneous as looking at Specimen A and its great to the five hundredth generation ancestor and deciding that because they should count as two separate species there must have been some momentous leap in the middle to make Specimen A possible. Consciousness could easily be a smooth spectrum from human to insect and we wouldn&#x27;t know it because everything next to our level is extinct.

Is there a formal language in philosophy? So that one can define the input formulas (axioms) and with some kind of &quot;philosophy math&quot; calculate things like &quot;what is the meaning of life and everything&quot; and &quot;what is consciousness&quot;?<p>Otherwise for me it all looks like words juggling continuing for many centuries. They really should implement a programming language for philosophy and outsource the hard parts to Ukraine.

After reading this somewhat innocuous article and then going through this thread... I think the reason there is so much heated discussion here is that the simple suggestion to invert one&#x27;s assumptions regarding physical reality and consciousness, also implies an inversion of responsibility.<p>If it really is the case that consciousness is the basis for reality, then it must also mean that only you, the reader, can find this out for yourself. Then this means you cannot fall back to preachers or scientific publications. It&#x27;s up to you to do the work. From my experience, even just mentioning this idea of goal-driven contemplative practice often finds a lot of resistance if you don&#x27;t approach it carefully.

This article reminds me of the difficulty ascribing meaning to data. The meaning of a series of bits - ASCII or Unicode, data or executable - is dependent on consciousness to give it meaning. Much like all of the physical observations of science.

How is it that an article that basically describes the concept of qualia never once mention the word?<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Qualia" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Qualia</a>

Why are we Conscious? I think the answer, at a very high level, must be that evolution followed the path of least resistance: consciousness has high value per amount of energy expended on it and is easy to achieve.

I think consciousness is one of those things that is not defined well enough for us to understand it. Until there is a breakthrough in the understanding of consciousness itself there won&#x27;t be any real conscious ai.<p>It&#x27;s like when we learned to fly, we needn&#x27;t understand how birds&#x27; wings work. We had to understand the principles of aerodynamics or what is flying itself.<p>That&#x27;s why I think imitating the brain won&#x27;t work, (deep learning etc.) just like the early attempts to fly didn&#x27;t, even if we&#x27;ll know the function of every single neuron.

&gt; &quot;...brains that can discriminate between wavelengths of light but that don’t see red or yellow or blue or any other color...&quot;<p>Well. I operate under the idea that we can only perceive three colors. Everything else is based on the brain&#x27;s interpretation of that input. That is, for example, we don&#x27;t see purple, the brain invents purple.<p>That aside, simply put, reality is a consensus. And it exists collectiveky for those who buy into that agreement.

If so, this would be backed by a great many ancient sources on this topic.<p>If so, it also creates great need to ponder how consciousness(es) are made to respond to their effects on others. If consciousness IS as wisdom traditions state, also what is needed is not empiricism, but plain commitment to respecting each other.<p>After all, saying &quot;okay - if I exist regardless, what gives?&quot; Others do too, and might also some reason or actual thing which makes this possible - and to honor that possibility is actually to behave safer, have more pleasant dealings, and ultimately concern ourselves with best practices in getting the most of what we get in addition to our bare consciousness.<p>If it can exist without any particular structure, it can be placed in other circumstances less desireable.<p>I.e. every cultural tradition regarding virtue and karma, and G-d.<p>I see evidence that the scientifically minded would be thrilled to know the makings of this, even if it would be n=1 revelation. I feel like the traditions given us are sensibly concerned with preserving awareness of these lately-arriving observations of upper dimensional&#x2F;physics-derived approximations of how our selves are maintained in this projection by [previously unseen&#x2F; allegorically hinted in tradition] structures which are indeed real.<p>yadda yadda.. the wisest people always say this, and they themselves often got there the hard way, and yet report good and thankful circumstances from choosing respectful behavior.<p>So its somewhat able to be &quot;controlled-for.&quot; The least-empirical and most curious, agenda-less, all say: do right, there is a supporting element that deserves respect, and since we do exist &quot;hereafter&quot; by some model in many different ways, its always worth not EXCLUDING this.<p>If we ARE, then what currently we are is only a portion. That creates curiosity and investigation - I do it. I discover what I didn&#x27;t expect. Now I hope others do, and do better at getting this idea to those who refuse its possibility.<p>If so - if we are - that is to say, we exist regardless - it also means there&#x27;s much to concern regarding not combating factors that will otherwise never preserve us. Instead, preserving mutual respect is greatest beneath whatever preserves all - because there would be no way free of the &quot;other&quot; if forever allowed for any result.

Does consciousness itself suffer from intractability similar to Gödel&#x27;s incompleteness theorems? Is there a consistent set of axioms that can even include all the truths about what we mean when we say &quot;consciousness&quot;? If so, can we go further and use consciousness to actually fully enumerate all the interactions necessary for it or all the implications of it from within a conscious system?

This article highlights a massive issue with the field of philosophy in which there&#x27;s a disconnect between advancements in neuroimaging analysis and metaphysics. The author claims that physical properties define &quot;nothing at all&quot;. Yet what they tell are extremely valuable in emulating these systems and what they can teach us with the exploding fields of ML and AI. In the last decade big improvements have been made in the field neuroimaging. Trying to put the pieces together from neuroscience and emulation to lessons learnt is hard, but possible.<p>There&#x27;s a worrying trend that&#x27;s becoming more apparent in regards to the hard problem of consciousness. New neuroimaging analysis techniques indicates that when you take away individual functional elements of how the brain, we&#x27;re left not much at all. At what point does a series of embedded components become a computer? At what point does a series of neural networks become conscious?<p>This is going to be an issue we&#x27;re going to have to address now. Where is the line of conscious for an individual to make a legal choice? Think of someone wanting assisted suicide, in which they&#x27;re often in a debilitated state. A call is going needed to be made if they&#x27;re sentient enough. A tough call given it carries the massive burden. If we continue improving ML and AI we&#x27;re going to have to make the call from the other end as well.

I&#x27;ve recently watched this talk titled &quot;Your brain hallucinates your conscious reality&quot; [1] by Anil Seth, seems relevant to the topic. If you are intrigued by the question of the original article you might like the TED talk.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=lyu7v7nWzfo" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=lyu7v7nWzfo</a>

I wonder why we believe that the evolution that has equiped us to be conscious and to wonder about consciousness (which I think is probably part of the deal of consciousness) has provided us with minds and languages that can understand or discuss it? In fact, it seems quite likely that being able to understand consciousness has no evolutionary value at all!

From my (very) personal point of view, I think consciousness has nothing to do with sensor or motor functions...we know so little about what we (as humans) and &quot;conscious&quot; beings really are that we&#x27;re always in the realm of conjectures. Self-awareness is a so complicated subject to define anyways.

&gt; there could conceivably be brains that perform all the same sensory and decision-making functions as ours but in which there is no conscious experience.<p>That makes no sense to me. What is consciousness but a mechanism for making decisions? A brain that has all of our decision making functions would be conscious by definition.

&gt;the question of why we have conscious experience at all.<p>Maybe because being conscious rather than say knocked unconscious is an advantage for survival and reproduction?<p>While that is semi joking, consciousness quite likely arose as a functional, being aware of what&#x27;s going on, thing with qualia (what it feels like) a kind of side effect.

Bernardo Kastrup has written some compelling books arguing that idealism is more rational and skeptical than materialism. The best introduction is probably <i>Why Materialism Is Baloney</i>. A more academic version, consisting mostly of peer-reviewed papers, is <i>The Idea of the World</i>.

All models are wrong, some models are useful.<p>I could start by dissecting the article and detail the sloppyness in the reasoning, the strawman of ignoring emergence, the value and inevitability of referential semantics etc, but ultimately the deeper question remains:<p>How is the proposed model supposed to be useful?

&gt; For this reason, the “what it’s like” to be a conscious mind can’t be described in the purely relational, dispositional terms accessible to science. There’s just no way to get there from here.<p>Chalmers can keep saying this until he’s blue in the face, but it doesn’t make it true.

I still don&#x27;t understand what people mean when they say something like<p>&quot;Rather than trying to reduce consciousness to fit into the box of relational&#x2F;dispositional properties, it is time that we begin to explore it for what it is—and for the answers that studying it on its own terms, in its full splendor and variety, stands to provide.&quot;<p>What are you supposed to do with that? What does recognizing the ontological primacy of consciousness actually entail?<p>A lot of this sounds like the kind of &quot;center of what&#x27;s known&quot; fallacies that plagued human thought in the pre-scientific era. The sun isn&#x27;t central to anything, the Earth isn&#x27;t central to anything, human consciousness is probably not central to anything either. Why wouldn&#x27;t that pattern hold here. Why wouldn&#x27;t we just be wrong about how unique consciousness is?

I went through the whole indoctrinated-religious, &quot;devout&quot; atheist, &quot;scientific&quot; agnostic, and now I guess I&#x27;m a theist.<p>Why? Because I read a book on consciousness that came like a bolt out of the blue and I understood that we do not understand.<p>I don&#x27;t buy this &quot;emergent property of the mind&quot; thing because while I understand evolutionary theory I am not sure how you bridge that gap to subjective experience.<p>I have absolutely no clue what this &quot;god&quot; is that I accepted, but I know I&#x27;m not going to be punished for leaving this comment.<p>EDIT: just read the comments. I&#x27;ve been to BNL and CERN.

Still doesn&#x27;t explain what it is, therefore it is almost pointless to answer this. Not sure how whether it came first, second or third matters to explaining what it really is and its relationship on reality.

&gt;The issue is that physical properties are by their nature relational, dispositional properties. That is, they describe the way that something is related to other things<p>Author neglects to mention that this may apply to everything except the universe itself.<p>&gt;Something in the universe has to have some kind of quality in and of itself to give all the other relational&#x2F;dispositional properties any meaning. Something has to get the ball rolling.<p>The &quot;something&quot; may be the universe, i.e. its total wave function. Occam&#x27;s Razor suggests looking for simple explanations rather than assuming the existence of things not detectable.<p>Could the universe itself be conscious? Making such a claim would seem to make the author&#x27;s argument a tautology.

I don’t agree that consciousness came first. Before I was born, there was a large amount of time when I and my consciousness did not exist. Yet the objective world as we know exited then.

Commence with the &#x27;there is no free will&#x27; crowd followed by argumentation that assumes free will (in order to change people&#x27;s minds... which they have no control over).

Christof Koch on consciousness <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;piHkfmeU7Wo" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;piHkfmeU7Wo</a>

I may get pooh poohed here, but to me, this discussion is one of a spiritual nature. My belief is that God created all things spiritually first, before he created them physically. And, God is what gives all life it&#x27;s sentience. Understanding the brain is only part f the equation. The soul of man (and woman) is both the physical body (including the brain) and the spirit. Until we can fully grasp the spiritual, we will never be able to make the &quot;leap&quot; between paper and conscience. Anyone else feel this way?

The hard problem will be a very hard even after it has been solved. Philosophers dont even want it solved, they just like to discuss it.

This &quot;problem&quot; is mainly a symptom of religious worldviews that are still holding out deep inside some heads.

You can study consciousness, but not scientifically. The &quot;trick&quot; is that, though you can&#x27;t make a scientific instrument to detect or measure consciousness, you do have one &quot;instrument&quot; to use: your own consciousness. For example, two people can &quot;merge&quot; and experience themselves as one.

I wonder if she knows this is essentially the Kalam cosmological argument for God&#x27;s existence.<p><i>The heavens declare the glory of God, and the sky above proclaims his handiwork. Day to day pours out speech, and night to night reveals knowledge.</i> (Psalm 19:1-2, ESV)

What if self awareness comes first?

What if it doesn’t?<p>There, see how easy that was?

Dreams —- to me pose as the lowest hanging fruit to peeling the viscous mutable layers of ...our consciousness.

See also: Dean Radin

Just a summary of Wittgenstein&#x27;s Tractatus

I can answer a little bit of the question. Why do rotten eggs smell like rotten eggs and not roses? The answer is: it&#x27;s actually arbitrary.<p>In my 20s I broke my leg fairly badly. It damaged the nerve, but luckily left the sheath of the nerve undamaged. The end result was that half my foot was paralysed. What I never realised is that if the nerve sheath is undamaged, the nerve will regrow! So slowly over time I started to get feeling back in my foot. I don&#x27;t know exactly what goes on, but I&#x27;d get this sharp shooting pain, like a needle in my foot and slowly after each time, I&#x27;d regain a little bit of feeling (I don&#x27;t know... is that just the nerve endings &quot;reattaching&quot;???)<p>Eventually, I got pretty much all the feeling back... except it wasn&#x27;t mapped properly. The space between my toes felt like the sole of my foot and various other strangeness. Slowly I got used to it. A few years later, my brain had completely translated everything and the space between my toes felt like the space between my toes. Even though I know it&#x27;s mapped differently I can&#x27;t consciously distinguish between the feelings I have now and the feelings before I broke my leg.<p>So a rose smells like a rose because the receptors that are activated when you smell a rose are different from the receptors that are activated when you smell a rotten egg. It&#x27;s just like the nerve endings between my toes are different than the nerve endings on the sole of my foot. But it&#x27;s just input for your brain, nothing more. Of course we have an aversion to the smell of rotten eggs, but that&#x27;s just hard wired -- more input for the brain. There are lots of people who have aversion to smells that other people like.<p>In terms of &quot;consciousness&quot;, I think it&#x27;s likely an illusion of sorts. We experience a kind of continuum of consciousness. In reality, though, there is only an instant. Our awareness is an artefact of our memory.<p>Behaviour couldn&#x27;t exist without a feedback loop. For those of us who are programmers, this is pretty obvious. In order to have a state machine, the new output needs to not only look at new input, but also its current state. Every instant we exist we are processing new input and also our current state (which seems to prioritise recent inputs). We exist instantaneously, but because we are processing previous data along with new data, it creates an illusion of having existed over a continuum. Additionally, the only reason we have an ego is simply because our data networks are isolated. If I could access the data of another brain in the same way I can access data in my own brain, there would be no way to distinguish between the &quot;two of us&quot;. There would be no way to distinguish between &quot;my thoughts&quot; and &quot;somebody else&#x27;s thoughts&quot;. &quot;I&quot; would not exist... or rather &quot;I&quot; would be the &quot;two of us&quot;. It&#x27;s just an artificial distinction based on a lack of ability to access the data.<p>Or at least that&#x27;s the way I look at it. There is no way to know for sure. It might just be the FSM manipulating me like a puppet.

We will be able to explain and understand consciousness in objective terms 1 second after the first person achieves flight by pulling themselves into the air with the bucket they are standing in. About 5 seconds after a computer can run a 100% simulation of itself running a 100% simulation of itself. A whole minute after someone writes a program that can tell if&#x2F;when any other programs will stop running.<p>As a question that&#x27;s dogged us for thousands of years, maybe its time to accept its just a shitty question.

Sorry to be so direct, but I have to say it like this otherwise it doesn&#x27;t get through.<p>Consciousness is that which makes us go take something to eat in the morning so we don&#x27;t die of hunger, keeps us from running into cars or falling off a high place, allows us to work and be intelligent in our actions so that we cover our needs, guides us to form relations and make babies (thus replicate consciousness further).<p>I think we are agents with the purpose of survival and reproduction. That is only possible by adaptation to the environment, including society and nature. While we&#x27;re busy at keeping ourselves alive, we have to act intelligently and learn from our mistakes. There is nothing outside the realm of physics and nature, just plain old agent+environment+learning+self-replication.<p>It feels like something to see blue (or to be a bat) because it is linked to survival, because we have senses and brains to create models of the world, because we have positive and negative signals (rewards) that guide our present and future actions and the value we attach to all life situations, and ultimately because life depends on it and self-replication would eliminate inefficient agents and leave those who are fit.<p>In short, consciousness is an adaptation mechanism in service of self replication in an environment with limited resources and competition.<p>I think all this dualist incredulity towards science is bullshit. Instead, the evolutionary process and the reinforcement learning process are sufficient to explain it. If we want to learn about consciousness we should not look only at the brain but at the environment and its limitations. It is the environment that shaped consciousness into existence.<p>I know it&#x27;s not as poetic as souls and hard-problems, but it is the simplest explanation that fits.

This seems so intuitively wrong to me; like postulating that Windows is necessary for assembly to exist.<p>Almost none of the preliminary claims in this article feel compelling to me: &quot;no physical property or set of properties can explain what it’s like to be conscious&quot;. Where is the proof of this? All the author does is re-state this sentence in different ways.<p>I imagine people have had similar conversations throughout history: &quot;no one can really predict weather&quot;, &quot;no-one understands economics&quot;, &quot;no-one understands what makes people fall in love&quot;; but would you claim that (for example) love is the trigger, or boundary condition which causes reality to coalesce?<p>The claims which <i>do</i> feel believeable are: 1) Many aspects of physical reality are relational 2) Some boundary conditions are necessary in order to make everything well-defined<p>But there is a real gap from the points above, to the conclusion that consciousness is the missing boundary-condition. Maybe we just haven&#x27;t discovered the missing boundary-condition yet. Or maybe there is none, and reality is ill-defined.<p>Everyone who&#x27;s going on about &quot;we don&#x27;t know enough about the brain to even START this&quot; feels like a Sunday-school teacher telling me not to question the Greater Truths. It&#x27;s a thought-killing sentiment. It&#x27;s a subconscious defense mechanism for people who can&#x27;t admit that they&#x27;re a mostly-deterministic machine.

What a useless article.<p>Consciousness is not an impossible problem. It only becomes absurd if it&#x27;s tinted of mysticism and dipped into a half-digested understanding of the current scientific consensus.<p>First, let&#x27;s demystify conscience. Scientifically, there&#x27;s no soul - it&#x27;s a religious concept that has no meaning outside of it. What&#x27;s left of conscience is its shell, its interface.<p>If we can model something that behaves like conscience, well, we created a genuine conscience.<p>There are two sides to the shell of conscience. One is the outer shell: the problem is to build something that appears to be conscient. This is a reasonably hard CS or neurobiology problem but by no means impossible. We are getting reasonably close to generating seemingly conscious automata. Surely it&#x27;s possible to see specific parts of the brain connected to this function: for example, the speech center, and so on. So: hard to do, but doable.<p>The other part is the inner shell, or &quot;self-conscience.&quot; This has to do with perception, mostly, and abstraction. We have already created expert systems that can perceive and give meaning to a lot of inputs.<p>The trick is creating a system that can perceive itself, its state like it sees the world. This will require a general AI or strong AI, which is currently believed by many experts to be possible although super hard to do. Again though, this is a CS problem, it&#x27;s addressable by science, and I have no doubt it&#x27;s a matter of time until we can settle it.<p>A machine with both characteristics would be just as alive as you or me. It would perceive the world semantically. It would understand to be conscious, and we would recognize it to be conscious too.<p>At that point, the question of consciousness will become once more only attractive to philosophers and priests. The rest of us will have less problem accepting one of these machines as &quot;alive and conscious.&quot;