Wolfram's idea about computational irreducibility is an interesting one. Going through it again reminds me a lot of how intriguingly difficult the Navier–Stokes existence and smoothness problem is.<p>But in this article Wolfram's view on consciousness occurs to be nothing more than a bunch of abstraction layers put together in a badly baked Lasagna.<p>For anyone who is computationally minded, I believe by just having a psychedlic experience one would gain mucher greater insight into the intricacies of consciousness than reading articles like this.<p>I highly doubt without constant experimentation with psychedlics one can come up with anything computationally insightful about consciousness, espeically theroies and mathematical models with practical applications in emerging fields such as BCI<p>e.g.<p>- models about how the brain's (sub)conscious attention mechanism works and how it plays a part in the (sub)conscious process of habit forming<p>- models about the conscious percpetion of time and how can one go about slowing it down or speeding it up and how will that play out in the (sub)conscious memory encoding and decoding processes<p>I believe the study of consciousness ultimiately resolves around the study of cybernetics in a none-ergodicity system within a certain set of constraint satisfactions. I think perhaps one can even apply frameworks such as homotopy type theory (HoTT) for a certain categorical formalization.
To add one more critic: A couple minutes into the text, I still didnt read something of substance/consequence.<p>Lots of hand waiving and describing the usual phenomena in other terms.<p>I will follow this thread hoping someone points out that good stuff is coming later in the text, but I doubt it.
This seems to follow a theme I've observed lately around the underlying laws of physics and the quantum nature of consciousness, here's some research that's more on the theoretical side: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26505858" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26505858</a>
I think of consciousness as a feeling and nothing more. Similar to the feeling of free will, both are an "illusion" and we're not actually aware or free. The universe is made of instructions that everything follows and including us. We believing in awareness is just instructions for how we operate as subsystems of the Universe and like or unlike other subsystems of the universe. I find the idea simpler to grasp if you think of the Universe just bruteforcing every possible sequence of patterns and where we eventually have subsystems assuming they have awareness & free will.
I don't know if something of this is real, falsifiable, or how much of it is original work (and surely you need to peel off the Wolfram classic ego driven sentences) but I think I'm not the only one finding this project thought provoking and beautiful, at least in a poetic sense.
It really doesn't matter to know exactly what consciousness is.<p>Because high levels of intelligence and auto-drive can fully operate complexly enough to seem "conscious".<p>I would start a research stating exactly what would constitute a "conscious human", maybe we could find not every human on the planet is actually conscious.<p>Maybe most people are just looping into some psychological / environmental / sociological context, just like scripts running happily in loop, but not stepping outside its own code, at least not intentionally.<p>The hypoteshis of humans being complex algorithms, beside the tabu chit-chat, implies the possibility of hacking minds just we can hack programs, looking for their bugs, triggering exploits to fully manage humans into a different setup, in order to make them work towards a different goal from what they were originally intended (having being pre-programmed by the society and/or parents).
Consciousness... from a physics perspective. Well that sets off alarms already with the title.<p>goign through the article, it does get better, but not much. the first step they go through is redefining consciousness. Well, most definitions of consciousness are vague and nearly meaningless, so that would be good news if there's wasn't. But it is... just as vague and meaningless as any other definition, but without the benefit of at least being the same thing other people are talking about.<p>After that I feel like this gets into my complaints about most philosophy I've read. Complicated ideas based on vague ideas that just sorta ask you to go along and accept it on feel. IMO, I find the whole thing needs some major simplification and/or far more solid premises.
I'm not a philosopher, but I don't understand why we need an explanation for subjective experience, how could we exist without it? If someone were to shove their hand into an open flame, but they also happened to lack the subjective experience of pain, it's conceivable they might not immediately recoil from the flame. This type of reaction doesn't seem compatible with our evolutionary history, the subjective experience of pain is unbearable because if it wasn't it wouldn't function as an efficient guide for avoiding damage to the body. All other subjective experiences seem to follow from the same logic.
I think the HN community can do better re Wolfram. He is productive and accomplished, and another poster said long ago great to work with. In his interview with Fridman he appears quite enjoyable. It seems Wolfram has a good record of not being factually wrong.<p>Now, regarding this article. I don't know enough math or physics (he has a PHD from Caltech) to be able to judge it on those terms. I also don't know enough philosophy or neurology to be able to pick apart his definition of consciousness. On the other hand, like most of us, I've thought and read about what consciousness might be, and this article expands my thinking space.
It's all a bit "if we assume there is an observer that can make sense of things, then they do indeed make sense of things". Like confirmation bias incarnate.
No explanation of consciousness cuts it if it does not address how first person perspective comes about. No computation results in first person perspective.
We can hear our thoughts and we can remember having "heard" them. I think that is consciousness. It is sensory perception of some of our brain-processes, interpreted by our brain, just like brain can categorize seeing blue as just that.
OK, I'll admit that I enjoy Stephen's writing on this topic, though I find it very longwinded. I like that it gets me thinking in weird directions, very outside the box
Wait, Wolfram has a physics project? Like, with a lab and everything?<p>Oh, no, <i>not</i> like with a lab. Like with "make some assumptions about what's going on that match Wolfram's pre-conceived ideas, then run some simulations and see if anything that looks somewhat like reality falls out". It's quite a stretch to call that a "physics project".<p>From that starting point, I'm skeptical that anything that falls out is going to shed light on actual real-world consciousness.
Careful. "Consciousness" may just be a language issue. It seems like a profound concept but it's really just a word with a very vague and complex definition.<p>If someone tried to formalize "consciousness" it would be a technical book about 1000 pages long or something and all we're doing is debating about what goes in the book.<p>It's very similar to the question what is "life?" I mean we understand that biology is just carbon based molecular machines, debating what "life" is as a general concept outside of biology is not a profound issue, it's just a language issue and you'd just be debating what the definition of a word "life" should encompass.
The unexplainable: why are you you and cosmogony.<p>Consciousness seems to be a mostly self-assembling, emergent property of suitably complex learning systems that are capable of abstract pattern matching, modeling, and anticipation. I have a difficult time (intractable) understanding from where you or I come into being as a conscious entity.