If it’s just the universe, what would the universe want to experience? Should everybody live comfortably and kind of predictably or would the universe want to experience the maximally possible variance in life?
No, consciousness is just what it feels like when a meat brain uses its meat to change its focus of attention; which gives rise to beliefs (some of them even true!) about a meat brain having a self.
It takes time, because brains are made of meat, and meat is slow.
It’s leaky, because brains are made of meat, and meat oozes.
It generates the image of a “self” because brains are in meat bodies and actually do have physical continuity rather than being disconnected instants of computation; a term for “I, me, myself” is a rough model of the existence of brain features like memory, meat features like hormones, and even ape social-behavior features.
Attention/awareness is leaky and takes time; meat pumps rhythmically; and chemicals stick around.
And the meat brain can notice its own meaty doings. Just as it builds models of the outside world, it builds models of itself, with thoughts like “I am in the middle of doing an action” or “I am impatient” or “I feel sleepy” or “OW, LEG CRAMPS SUCK!” That is, its attention can range over not only the leg cramp itself, but its own reaction to having a leg cramp, including how the existence of leg cramps fits into its larger model of whether the world is a terrible place.
It usually comes up with a lot of correct beliefs out of this reflection, like “this is my leg, not your leg” and “I know English” and “Wow, I am distractable this morning, maybe it’s the strong coffee”. But it also comes up with dubious beliefs like “I am an eternal soul”, “I am fully continuous in time”, or “Oh God, what sin did I commit to deserve this leg cramp?”
(“This is my leg, not yours” is important because there’s nothing anyone can do to your leg that will make my leg cramp go away. The “self/other” distinction is important to consciousness because it has real-world implications; bodies really are physically disconnected from one another, which is why depersonalization can be an unhealthy thing for a consciousness to do too much.)
There’s no reason to believe ChatGPT or the like are conscious, because they don’t have the properties that consciousness is a model of. They’re not fed information about their own well-being or place in the world. They don’t observe their own processing. They do run largely as disconnected instants of computation. They don’t live in a space where having a sense of “self/other” is effective.
(Not yet, anyway. There are folks out there trying to build AI systems that do have the feedback loops that might generate something like consciousness. This is probably a bad idea, and may even be an evil one.)
This is only a problem because don’t clearly define what they mean by the word.
If someone is talking about the capacity for people to think, as in process information from their senses, neurology has explained much of that.
Generally when it’s treated like a mystical phenomena that can’t be explained it’s because people want an answer to some vague sense that something else is going on. They feel like there’s more going on, but can’t specify what there is to be explained other than this feeling.
“But explaining things that reside “only in consciousness”—the red of a sunset, say, or the bitter taste of a lemon—has proven far more difficult”
Lemons are sour, damn it, not bitter! Lemons are part of the universe and sour, so any consciousness that perceives them as bitter is not part of the universe. /s
What else would be then? Whatever happens is part of the universe development. We are the universe being conscious of itself. We think we are something else apart, or self made…
As I see it, people keep developing mental constructs to make the experience of their own existence feel more meaningful, more important and potencially eternal, because the thought of insignificance and eventual death is just too scary.
It amazes me how many people will take the specialness of their experience as a given, even when thinking about the big picture is literally their job.
For all the words we can use on it, it’s lost on people who never had thoughts and experiences that prompted them to be curious about the nature of consciousness and reality.
It’s like discussing the bitterness sourness of a lemon with someone who never tried one.
It’s simply irrelevant. If you believe this theory exactly nothing changes about what you can predict about the world. That’s what knowledge is all about. If you have a theory that doesn’t behave differently under some different circumstances, you’ve essentially said nothing.
Also reminds me a bit of the chapter in “Surely you’re joking, Mr. Feynman!” called “Is Electricity Fire?”, if someone knows that.
Consider math, it doesn’t make any empirical predictions on its own, as it is just a set of abstract symbols and rules. Do you consider mathematical facts to be a form of knowledge?
Maths and reality are different. Very different. Reality can be explored empirically while maths is logic not empirical. We can never say we are 100% sure about the rules/laws we have discovered about our reality, but we can say for sure that a maths theorem is true or false.
Maths is a set of self-consistent tools that can be used to predict what happens in reality. The mathematical description of reality is an estimate, contains countless assumptions and inaccuracies about where things are and what properties they have. In fact in quantum physics, we literally can’t know momentum and location at the same time.
Maths can describe (or I should say, approximate) realities that don’t exist.
Because maths and reality are different domains, we can know different things about them using different approaches.
In fact in quantum physics, we literally can’t know momentum and location at the same time.
I mean, we can know a precise wavefunction, though. That’s a bit like saying we can’t give a single point where a tsunami is. It seems highly likely to me personally that physics is mathematical and we’ve just kind of absorbed it in the process of evolving intelligence.
Arguably “it’s impossible to violate energy conservation given time-invariant action” is an empirical prediction, and that’s a specific case of Noether’s theorem.
Yeah, this isn’t really a theory yet. That doesn’t necessarily mean it’s an invalid concept, though. For example, if game theory turned up in fundamental physics somehow, wouldn’t that suggest intelligence might be more fundamental than we assumed?
There’s nothing wrong with speculation as long as everyone knows that’s what going on.
Take the work of Julian Jaynes for example; it’s fringe, it’s speculative, but he’s asking questions that nobody else asked before and that in itself is worthwhile because it can pave the way for better questions which are falsifiable.
Why does philosophy constantly twist things into an over complicated mythical mess, and then act like it’s some novel insight? Like the things with colors: they only exist subjectively so they aren’t real in any other sense than being observed, so it’s only the observation that makes them real, and does that mean they are even real???
Yes, they are. Subatomic particles vibrate (or absorb vibrations) at specific frequencies, and therefor emit electromagnetic waves at certain frequencies when stimulated. That is real and objective. Evolution has left us with sensors and neurons that can detect and interpret some of these frequencies that appear to us as colors. That is subjective, but the science behind it is not. That’s what happens. Is the color real? Well, define the question better and there is an actual answer. The vibrations are real. Your interpretation is also real, but in a different way. Does the color exist without an observer? Well, what’s your definition of color? Does a tree falling in the woods with nothing to hear it make a sound? Well, what’s your definition of a sound?
A color is an example that not all perceived can be described using terms of the physical world, and has variables that can only be experienced rather than described
It all exists in some capacity. Color is either the electromagnetic frequency emitted by particles when stimulated by radiation, or it is the electrochemical signals firing through your brain which process an image based on the way cells in your eyes absorb those frequencies. Or, more precisely I suppose, the intersection of both is where “color” exists, as one cannot occur without the other.
Another aspect of this conversation was what was posited by the Sapir Whorf Hypothesis. The experiential differences in perception of color can also be attributed to differences in culture / upbringing which influenced one’s processing of the stimuli itself. I tend to oversimplify it to the firmware analogy. Sometimes you get raw input and the languages provide different libraries for comtextualizing this input.
Red is light at the 480 THz range. Blue is light at the 670 THz range. I think that’s perfectly described using terms of the physical world. If you’re talking about “what we experience as color” as being difficult to describe in our consciousness, then sure but that’s the case for every single thing we experience. Same way I can describe the musical note A as 440 Hz. Does an A to you sound the same to me? My tongue is sensing a sugar molecule, does the experience of tasting it feel the same to you?
Not a single human perception can be described in words, but we can all compare perceptions to other perceptions and agree on the same answer. Perceptions are simply us recognizing patterns in our environment. Red is me recognizing my eyeball is looking at an object reflecting light in the 480 THz range. You look at that red ball and you also recognize it as reflecting light at 480 THz. Does it need to be described any further?
I mean, it’s a pretty settled question, but I don’t know if I’d say “stupid”. How do you prove something you cannot ever measure exists? I think there’s rough agreement that you can at least be very confident the sound does, although how exactly varies by school of thought.
Not sure if I understood you correctly, but in that case you cannot measure the tree falling and therefore you would not be able to even ask or think of that question.
So that’s a point against it existing, but maybe you find the fallen tree later and ask if it was loud when it fell. Most people would agree a tree works the exact same way watched or not, though. There’s different justifications why. Some people would say ontological momentum; I’d point to Occam’s razor, which can be mathematically derived from Solomonoff calculus, and the laws of physics we have which can fit on a pamphlet and are supposed to apply anywhere at any time.
Ah, but is a pressure wave propagating through air truly a sound if it does not interact with something that can hear? Or is it just the movement of air???
It does seems like philosophers do that sometimes, but how do you know there’s electromagnetic radiation in the first place? You can’t sense it unless if happens to vibrate in a narrow frequency range and even then only imperfectly. So, there’s also really necessary philosophy. I guess it’s just hard to objectively separate the quality stuff from the wankery.
I suppose what it is is that smaller questions are answered, bringing along with these answers jargon and special terms, then these special terms are used to define greater special terms, and so on until you end up with a big twisty answer to a seemingly simple question, and people who haven’t read the answers with the smaller special terms look at the twisty answer in understandable bemusement.
Edit: This also happens to be one of life’s big unanswered questions. I had an assignment on it for my MPhil a couple of years ago.
“The universe danced towards life. Life was a remarkably common commodity. Anything sufficiently complicated seemed to get cut in for some, in the same way that anything massive enough got a generous helping of gravity. The universe had a definite tendency towards awareness. This suggested a certain subtle cruelty woven into the very fabric of space-time.”
Life creates it, makes it grow. Its energy surrounds us and binds us. Luminous beings are we, not this crude matter. You must feel the Force around you; here, between you, me, the tree, the rock, everywhere, yes. Even between the land and the ship.
The question is if consciousness only exist on this level.
We know that ant hives have a hivemind that is not present in the individual ant. Similarly humans can also be observed to create a zeitgeist on larger than the individual scale. Even individual humans pass through different states of consciousness from birth to death. So it very much seems that consciousness is scalable. So where are we on that scale, can it be scaled down as well as up?
Most things in the universe have recursive properties. They can be scaled up and down or be understood as the sum of their parts. Saying that consciousness is an emergent property is no different, but it’s sort of dodging the question just as badly as someone saying it’s a magical new law of nature.
Perhaps AI can help us determine what the minimum number of required parts to create the emergent property is and why it isn’t present in the same setup with just one less part, or with a different complexity. I doubt we’ll find the answer, but it might lead to some better questions.
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