I have been hearing about Koch, and Tononi, and panpsychism, and phi for years now, in these articles summarizing consciousness for laymen, (a group that includes me). And these very long articles bloviate but never go any further than giving a facile description of phi, claiming that this IIT "theory" is testable, and then not saying how it could be tested. The articles from five years ago and this one seem interchangeable.
I call bullshit. Could someone please explain what I'm missing?
I don't think you're missing anything. Tononi made a formula related to how complicated a system is, and claimed that its measures consciousness. And what are you supposed to say to that, when no one can agree on what the word "consciousness" means, but people are still so attached to the word?
Being able to model consciousness mathematically opens up some grotesque possibilities.
Human suffering presumably has some sort of limit based purely on our physical makeup. Suppose though the very concept of subjective suffering could be modeled in some way. Is there any law in the universe that says there is a limit to suffering, pain (or pleasure)?
Could an investigator of the future test out an algorithm on a conscious entity modeled in software, just to see what the mathematical limit of pain is? Maybe that's what Hell is...
It's interesting that our minds automatically turn to the worst possibility, even though this also implies that we could find out what the mathematical limit of joy is. Chances are, there would be a lot more processes simulating joy than pain.
I would suspect that the pleasant simulations are where research money gets poured into, to figure out how to replicate the feeling of joy in regular humans
Has been explored in Altered Carbon ( the book ). Digitised conscience loaded into computer simulation and torture for practically infinite amount of time
I imagine an unfortunate and unwilling architect of a genocide thinking softly, "Lucky for me suffering is limited by the exclusion axiom. Suffering can never exceed the Whole."
Excellent reference. I see that Aaronson is pointing to articles more than ten years old, so the lack of progress goes on longer than the five years I mentioned.
You are no missing anything. Reputations in academy are not only made by being correct and inventive. You can go pretty far if you know how to dress-up bullshit.
I completely agree, and would only point out that the ability to get far on properly calibrated bullshit is a well established phenomenon throughout human history.
I love when I run into this, because I actually took two classes taught by Dr Peter Boghossian, the first was Critical Thinking, the second was Atheism. Checking Portland State's course catalog, he's still teaching those classes.
Oh, and as you might imagine, there was a pretty considerable amount of material that existed in both of those classes.
See above. TFA claims that IIT is testable, but does not say anthing at all about a test that has been published, a test that has been done, a test that some research group is doing,
a test that is being considered, a test that could be done given some scientific or technological development. Nothing.
I think there is a difference between a proof and the refutation of an argument. I expect proofs from scientific theories, and if a theory of consciousness would posit itself as scientific, I would be in perfect agreement with you that proofs or testable predictions should be provided. But I think here we are well into philosophy grounds, where neither proofs nor predictions are required. If that is the case, a philosophical claim needs to be actively rejected. I will admit that I still have to make my mind whether IIT is purely philosophy, purely scientific, or neither. Currently I don't think it's a theory of consciousness, rather just a model to "quantify" consciousness, without explaining its origin.
I mean, I just eat lunch while I read things, not sure why you think I've signed up to put a professional level effort into rolling my eyes at these guys.
A good place to start, if you are a firm skeptic and not willing to even attempt faith or your own empirical experiences, is a book called Entangled Minds. There is not a single claim made in this book which does not have a reference to a proper peer-reviewed paper attached to it, iirc several hundred papers in all. It firmly supports consciousness being in at minimum earthworms, and probably even ,,lower,, creatures.
Once you actually open your mind to this idea, you will begin to see it everywhere, and with practice be able to connect, communicate, and derive mutual benefit. It,s up to you to take the first step, though.
Of course, you can also choose to remain in the safe comfort of materialism. I know from experience that it can be a very lonely place. I wish you a happy journey, wherever it may lead.
I am a non-materialist and I think consciousness is not a thing. So there's that position too. What do humans, mammals and earthworms have in common that AI or robots do not (as yet?) I would not say it is consciousness (because my position is there is really no such thing) but rather they have in common the fact that they are alive and subject to the Darwinian replication program and guided by common mental processes like, thought, emotion, memory, proprioception, sensation.
By non-materialist I mean I do not see matter as distinct from information. I believe the only thing that exists is information. What is information? It is structure and meaning and pattern and potential. Information is entwined with entropy.
I don't believe consciousness exists in a meaningful way in the real world. It certainly exists as a word in a dictionary and as something for philosophical types to have woo debates over. I think the word is vague term that signifies different somewhat independent things that living organisms have to a greater or lesser extent (memory, emotion, thought, embodiment, etc). I believe attempting to have a scientific debate about consciousness is kind of like asking how many angels could dance on the head of pin.
Of course you're conscious. It's simply a label attached to the phenomena going on in your head. Denying you are conscious is about as substantive as people with certain psychiatric disorders saying they aren't real.
>If we can think of something that is not objectively measurable what suggests that it exists objectively as opposed to it being a subjective opinion?
That you prefer chocolate ice cream isn't objective. But that you have a preference for chocolate ice cream is objective. The content of the conscious percept isn't necessarily real, but the fact that you are having what we call a 'conscious percept' certainly is real. Just because it is happening in your head, why should it not be real?
I find that a very strange statement for a supposedly conscious being to make. Consciousness does absolutely objectively exist, or at least I can say it does for me. That its existence is not objectively measurable doesn't mean it doesn't exist, it just means that the philosophy of empiricism is not complete.
>I find that a very strange statement for a supposedly conscious being to make.
I don't claim to be conscious. I am alive and awake and thinking and sensing, etc.
>Consciousness does absolutely objectively exist, or at least I can say it does for me.
This sentence appears to confuse subjective experience with objective reality.
>That its existence is not objectively measurable doesn't mean it doesn't exist
If we can think of something that is not objectively measurable what suggests that it exists objectively as opposed to it being a subjective opinion?
Can you define consciousness without invoking subjective conscious experience? You agree there is not evidence of objective existence and yet you say it objectively exists because you subjectively feel it does. Is this not self-contradictory?
Are you claiming that subjective opinions do not exist, despite your own observations of your own subjective opinons?
Also, imagine you live in a box with a yellow ball. And you can speak to other people outside your box. They tell you they also live in a box with a yellow ball.
You will never have proof that they actually have yellow balls in their boxes. And they will never have proof that you actually have a yellow ball in your box.
Would you say that yellow balls are merely a subjective opinion, and don't exist?
First you have to define what you mean by "exist." Of course every idea that can be conceived exists in some sense.
That does not mean its existence is realised or useful. Is it useful (consequential) and consistent that yellow balls exist? If yes, then they do. If no, then they don't.
> Can you define consciousness without invoking subjective conscious experience? You agree there is not evidence of objective existence and yet you say it objectively exists because you subjectively feel it does. Is this not self-contradictory?
No, I'm saying it need not be objectively measurable to be real. This is what I mean by empiricism being an incomplete philosophy.
Hold your hand to a flame and tell me there is no experience that goes beyond the material world. It feels like something to experience pain. Why? That is the question here. To deny that there is such an experience is self deceiving.
How does believing that all things are information differ from believing all things are matter? Those sound just like two sides of the same coin to me.
Materialists see information as deriving (resulting) from a spatial - temporal - state distribution of matter or energy. Informational people see information as giving rise (causing) to matter and energy. I subscribe to the Mathematical Universe Hypothesis more or less and am sympathetic to Cyclic Conformal Cosmology. Thus cause and effect are reversed.
I always was more impressed on why information on the atoms (how interact between themselves) is not as researched as the matter itself, is truly fascinating.
I have no doubt that lots of organisms are conscious, maybe even earthworms. And I certainly believe that I am!
My only point is that in the popular articles I've seen on consciousness, that discuss IIT, I have not, over many years, seen any description of a test of the theory, or even a statement of how it could be tested.
There's probably a hard limit to how much you can know about consciousness in general.
Say, for instance, that what IIT measures isn't consciousness but memory. It tells you that when you take general anesthetic, the IIT measure in the brain decreases. But it's hypothetically speaking possible that when you get anesthesized, you're still aware and feel everything that's happening to you (in the sense of having qualia), only that it never gets recorded to memory.
The result is the same: it appears, in retrospect, that you lost consciousness. But you can't prove that you actually did, only that your memory of the past behaves as if you did.
This seems fundamental, unless we through some future discovery can nail down what consciousness is. The consciousness-status of past me is just as opaque as that of other people.
I would be curious to see how the author would respond to this fairly detailed criticism of his book: [1] One excerpt from this amazon review goes "If you are impressed by statistics, blips on fMRI screens, taking correlations as proof of causality and meta-analysis as equal to replication, then you might like this book. If you are interested in what wild speculations parapsychologists are coming up with these days, then this is the book for you. If you are looking for evidence that psi is explained by quantum physics, you'll be disappointed."
The other day I was riding the train and a guy called me an idiot. Are you also interested in knowing how I responded to his claim?
why did you choose to post that particular review out of all the others? why not, for example, this one?
"Consider the possibly that classical physics is not only wrong but way wrong."
"A wild ride through the data supporting psi. I was for many years a reductionist like Michael Shermer. However, after reading more and books like this, my mind has accepted the reality that we know very little about where we came from and what really drives our human..."
> Of course, you can also choose to remain in the safe comfort of materialism.
To me it seems that materialism (or physicalism or any monism) inevitably leads to panpsychism. If there's only one kind of substance, it's either conscious or it's not, so everything has consciousness or nothing does. Panpsychists go with the former, probably because they think they are conscious, material beings.
> There is not a single claim made in this book which does not have a reference to a proper peer-reviewed paper attached to it,
I'm skeptical of this claim in general, there's a lot of research that either isn't reliable, biased or gets twisted to support a claim. Then this i think becomes pop science, low quality sounds realistic to me kind of things. When you have to emphasize "based on science" my bs sensor goes off.
Idk if anyone else feels that way, I feel like have to approach a lot claims skeptically in fields I don't know enough about.
well, from past experience, if i don,t address the ,,hard science,, aspect of it, i just get laughed at, especially at a place like here, where scientific beliefs reign supreme. that,s why i stress that fact.
i found it not only convincing, but also to have practical applications which are not difficult to arrive at with a little thinking.
if you are a well-intentioned tinkerer and hacker not limiting yourself to digital devices with a manual, you may find it intriguing.
How about a single neuron? After all, a single neuron is far more complex than a worm—just like a company is far less complex than the people who compose it.
Indeed, I’ve always suspected your observation may be the best definition of ‘life’ we currently have; namely, living systems are composed of parts that are more complex than the whole.
It’s a hard concept to articulate.
But, as you obviously know, the principle is obvious.. it doesn’t stop with the neuron; I would suspect the neurons membrane or its organelles are more ‘complex’ than the neuron itself.
How? A worm is a whole multicellular organism. A neuron's just a cell, one that's specialized into a single function.
All a single neuron does is pass a signal to the synaptic cleft in response to a chemical or electrical signal at the other end. It's a simple subunit of a larger system.
Saying a single neuron is more complex than a worm is like saying a cat6 ethernet cable is more complex than a blast furnace.
Just because a structure is larger and contains complex structures does not mean the larger system is more complex. For instance, I can create a logic gate with some friends. The logic gate is way simpler than the people composing it.
Neurons can have millions of mitochondria [1], which they dynamically move about the cell. Neurons are like amoeba with dozens of pseudopods when young. Amoeba are more complicated than worms, in terms of degrees of freedom, no?
A single neuron is not an independent self replicating organism so I would not say a single neuron is alive (on its own) per my definition, although it is part of a larger living creature.
Do you suppose neurons consider the super organism they are part of? No. So why should humans. Yes "we" are all fragments of the unified human experience, but our role, as individuals is to live as individuals.
Hmm, not sure I agree. I think our role is to create a harmonious global society. But to do that, we need to take care of yourself, our friends and family, etc.
And do neurons know about us? Well, they only know what they know. I think what they know could potentially be an empirical question. Some neurons are far more complex and connected than others.
The Amazon description says: "Radin shows how we know that psychic phenomena such as telepathy, clairvoyance, and psychokinesis are real, based on scientific evidence from thousands of controlled lab test".
Actually as far as I understand we know that telepathy does not work, and even more so with psychokinesis. Did you read the book, can you point me to the scientific evidence of psychokinesis?
fair enough, i,m not here to promote or defend his work, you,re free to think what you want. i shared what,s been helpful and enlightening for me personally, and it,s up to you to perceive it in your own way.
I am familiar with the contest, and I think it is about as winnable as getting a claim paid on the cheapest insurance policy. It's designed to promote an agenda the contest designer is strongly attached to, not as a truth-seeking device.
As mentioned, I've not found a good accessible podcast or YouTube video on the matter, so maybe that means it's up to me to make one. It's not my forte, so I don't know when that will happen.
However, here's an experimental method you may find helpful in your quest for knowledge: Find a creature, any creature, who appears in your life somehow... a cat, a dog, a worm, a rat, an insect, anyone you notice.
Rack your brain as hard as you can until you begin to see some semblance of feelings and desires in them, as well as a way in which you can help them achieve it. Now, go ahead and do that thing, and do your best to ensure that it works out.
When you're done, start paying attention to what happens to you in your daily course of existence. If you're into mindfulness meditation, here is where you apply that.
If you like, please return here and report your results, I'd love to hear from you! If the thread is already closed, you can find a way to contact me via my profile.
I think there's a sort of definitional sleight of hand going on here, a type that I see often these days:
1. [Word A] means [Concept X] to most people.
2. [Concept X] doesn't apply to [Item K], but [Concept Y] does.
3. By creating a new definition, finding an obscure definition, or twisting a current definition I can argue that [Word A] technically can mean [Concept Y], and then apply the term to [Item K].
4. Now that I'm using [Word A] for [Item K], most people will associate [Item K] with [Concept X].
So when we say "consciousness," most people conjure up some concept about human like thought and communication. That's the reason why most people find the word compelling, and it obviously (almost by definition) doesn't apply to most of the stuff talked about in this article.
When coming across arguments that rely on this type of sleight of hand, I think it's best to ask yourself what the article would actually be saying if the loaded term was replaced by another term or phrase that makes it explicitly clear what the other means. So when the author of this article writes something like this:
> This is utterly frigid, hundreds of degrees colder than any temperature terrestrial organisms can survive. But the fact that the temperature is non-zero implies a corresponding tiny amount of heat in deep space. This of course implies a corresponding tiny amount of experience.
It seems that he's arguing that consciousness is experience and experience is any activity, even at the atomic level. So if we remove the sleight of hand and ask "Is there some level of activity, even sleight activity at the atomic level, everywhere?" The answer might be affirmative (if we're using a loose sense of the word "everywhere"), but it's not a particularly surprising or even interesting question to answer.
You're correct that the mathematical veneer proposed here is bullshit - however the philosophical argument presented is perfectly sound. In these matters it's a mistake to adhere to the scientistic fallacy that the only things that are true are those that can be directly observed or quantified.
Don't "call bullshit" because you can't personally see how to falsify a theory by reading some popularized science articles. There are real papers with math behind these claims, and when you've read them and at least tried to understand the math, then you can call bullshit if you still think so.
The existence of "real papers with math behind thest claims" is sort of irrelevant. IIT is being proposed as a scientific theory, and the author of TFA claims that IIT is testable, but he has not said anything about actual testing. I cannot judge the math, and I doubt that I could judge a scientific paper describing a test. I'm simply asking: Is there any actualy testing, completed or in progress? TFA did not make such a claim.
By what possible commonly agreed upon definition could consciousness be equal to experience? The only result of accepting that definition would be having to invent a new name for what I (and I believe many with me) call consciousness, as badly defined as it is.
To put it in the words of Syndrome: if everything is conscious, nothing is.
This seems like another one of those debates where there's a spectrum and a bunch of people disagree about where on that spectrum it's okay to use a certain word.
> To put it in the words of Syndrome: if everything is conscious, nothing is.
I think what you're using as a counter argument is really a foundation of buddhist emptiness or vedanta brahman. i.e. that the percieved duality is an illusion
You're reading too much in my words, but I don't agree, I think: if it's perceived as X, there is something in it that makes it stand out as X. It may not be exactly what we think it is, but it does exist.
Before we can ask intelligent, falsifiable questions about consciousness we need a rigorous definition of what consciousness is. Personally I think the word is a vague term and that a rigorous definition is impossible. Therefore, if my hypothesis is true, we can not not scientifically investigate "consciousness" any more than we can scientifically investigate "divinity" or "spookiness." If you disagree with my hypothesis then I challenge you to define the term in a non-circular, objective way. My hypothesis is that consciousness is not an objective thing. It is merely an experience of the mind, thus it is an amorphous amalgam of feeling, memory, sensation, thought, embodiment.
There can be no rigorous definition of what consciousness is, just names (experience, subjectivity, awareness, self, you) because it has no qualities.
Consciousness is impossible to describe. It is neither hot nor cold, it has no size, and it experiences no passage of time as it is always now, eternal. There are no sides to it and no parts. It has no extent. It cannot be pointed to.
It is beyond all possible signification, yet it is the significance of all acts and events and things.
The closest thing you can get to a physical referent for consciousness is to notice that "consciousness" is a synonym for "now". (To spell it out: you have never once in all your life been conscious at a time other than now.)
- - - -
From my POV a very common mistake (TFA makes it, and you seem to as well) is to insist that the contents of consciousness are the thing itself. It's like mistaking the television program for the screen itself. The problem with that mistake is that there's no argument that can counter it. Reality of consciousness is an experiential thing that, once grokked, changes the nature of one's being, not a formula or measurement.
And because consciousness is not physical, I can't fathom where it comes from.
Like...I can grasp the idea of abiogenesis [0], the concept that organic molecules started self-replicating through chemical reactions that over millions of years started forming single-celled life that after a couple billion years turned into complex multi-cellular life and evolution has put us into the form we (and all other life) is today.
But this understanding just makes life look like nothing more than a very specific set of chemical and electrical reactions. To a naive external observer, the human brain is essentially nothing more than a highly complex electrical circuit, and yet, it is conscious.
We know what consciousness is, but it is very hard to define, because as you basically said, it is not physical. It exists, but can't be seen or even measured. You can see evidence of it by interacting with other life that appears conscious, but you can't prove it. If you could assemble a brain atom-by-atom, it could appear to be conscious, but would it? You won't know, and won't be able to know.
Even if we created "perfect" AI and put it into a "perfect" artificial body that was indistinguishable from an actual human (I'm imagining the hosts in the Westworld TV series), most people would say it wasn't conscious, but you couldn't prove it either way.
EDIT: In addition, we think about "conscious" decisions, but are your decisions truly made by consciousness? Think about how drugs will chemically affect the brain and can change behaviors. It makes me believe that free will is an illusion. Your consciousness doesn't make decisions, your physical brain does, and your brain can be altered. You're just a few million altered neurons away from an entirely different personality.
Well, FWIW, the old mystics all say that consciousness comes first, and the physical universe is something that happens "within" consciousness.
We are meat robots. Brains scans have shown that we do not "make decisions". Your brain makes the decision and then a few tens of milliseconds later you have the subjective experience of "I decide". Free will is an illusion. The neuroscientists discovered this but the philosophers and public haven't gotten the memo yet.
The fascinating thing is that the automatic meat robots become sophisticated enough to notice that they are conscious. This should technically be impossible but it does happen.
Ok I actually understand what you mean. You are defining "consciousness" to be the "essence of being" in that case I agree it exists but as you mention
>[Essence of being] is impossible to describe. It is neither hot nor cold, it has no size, and it experiences no passage of time as it is always now, eternal. There are no sides to it and no parts. It has no extent. It cannot be pointed to.
Therefore it is not amenable to scientific or logical study. Study of essence of being is a spiritual quest for the individual and the Universe as a whole.
Maybe some "enlightened" or "adept" can use their insight or gifts but it is not a general technology that can be studied, measured, classified, boxed, etc.
Yes, exactly. Broadly speaking we can't study awareness with the same Scientific Method that works for physical systems.
To be sure, there are some neuroscientists who are doing some very interesting and useful work studying things like "What's the least stimulus that causes a noticeable percept?"
There is a quality often associated with conscious consciousness. The ancients called it light, ie. the inner light of perception, reasoning, voice, etc.
Meditation is focus/defocus from even that.
As beings, humans are mostly preoccupied with the changing phenomena however.
TBF: I'm sure people felt the same way about space and time before good descriptions came around. There are plenty of things that seem way too abstract to allow for a precise description, but I think we should be relatively open to the possibility that there is a good description of consciousness, as it turned out there is for space and time. However, I'm pretty sure IIT is not it.
> I think we should be relatively open to the possibility that there is a good description of consciousness
I agree but what could that possibly be?
The only reason we know subjective awareness exists is that we "have" or "are" it ourselves.
It's not like electricity where we don't (and can't) know what it "is" but we can describe its behavior and effects mathematically with extraordinary precision because we have instruments to measure it.
We have no instruments that can measure subjective awareness, only self-reports.
Now it's often overlooked that you can investigate consciousness by means of your own consciousness. However, the information evolved that way always remains subjective, and so is of no avail to create objective descriptions of consciousness.
Sure we can. Biological life is something that replicates autonomously using DNA contained inside the apparatus of at least one cell. Viruses are not alive because they can not replicate on their own and do not produce their own cells. More abstractly life is something that follows the Darwinian program as demonstrated on Earth. If you had competing, replicating programs in a virtualised Earth-like environment I would say they were alive too if they could fully reproduce and establish resource economising ecosystems on their own.
I was creating an operational definition. Of course others disagree. That is how words work. They have narrower and broader meanings to different people or in different contexts. The fact the others disagree with my operational definition does not invalidate my operational definition which stands on its own.
Gp asserted "We don't know how to define life." I put forth a closed definition of life that makes sense. Others may have a less restrictive definition...my definition demonstrated that sufficient conditions exist to define life.
The difficulty I think is not in proposing a coherent definition, but in capturing precisely the shared understanding of what people mean when they say something is "alive".
My consciousness (I won't speak for yours) is integrated yet contains many parts. It is hierarchical — and I am aware that there is much that I am not aware of. For instance, with some effort I can notice that a white wall is made of millions of blinking colored neuropixels. But normally that is below my awareness. When I meditate, sometimes I can notice that I'm thinking verbal thoughts—suggesting that verbal thoughts transpire subconsciously, as well. When I engage with people, there is a sharing of consciousness—and though I'm not aware of all that the others are experiencing, I recognize that my own experience is just the tip of the iceberg of "experience."
> When I meditate, sometimes I can notice that I'm thinking verbal thoughts—suggesting that verbal thoughts transpire subconsciously, as well.
Something similar was coming up recently in my meditation practice, where I'd be aware of a vague impulse of a thought or idea arising before it became verbalized. Then I realized that I had had that experience before, when I was a kid and playing music a lot, where I'd notice the sensation of a thought beginning to arise but would put it away before it could get verbalized, since playing music needs a lot of attention and discursive thoughts will certainly make you mess up.
I'm not really trained in Zen, but in reading a book by Katsuki Sekida a while back he referred to thought impulses by varying degrees of 'nen', with the first 'nen' being a thought impulse of pure experience before it is recognized by a second or third degree 'nen'. This sort of felt related to that experience.
I have always had the rather unsettling feeling that my internal monologue is a post-hoc justification or rationalization for what my subconscious just caused me to do, and was not the cause.
Well I mean... you can't think a thought before you think it; so of course there would be a prior cause before you became aware of it. How else would it work?
Then you will really enjoy the work of Daniel Wegner. Most of his research is summarized in the book "Illusion of the Conscious Will".
His main argument is that we have two causal models to understanding the world, direct physical ones and "agent based". The first is good for figuring out a thrown rock is about to hit you and the agent based models are important for understanding things like a tigers sneaking up on prey.
Wegner proposes that when we apply this agent based model to our own actions we come up with the illusion of a conscious will. This is essentially the same as your post-hoc justification.
I'm not sure how free will would work, even in theory. If the universe is completely deterministic then of course there isn't freedom of will in that. If it is random, then that still wouldn't be freedom because it would still be out of our control.
I can't think of a way that it could work without invoking the metaphysical.
Well, if you take away the "I", so that it isn't the will of a singular being, but rather the free will of the elements of reality, manifesting itself— it makes sense— it isn't random, because it has coherence and it isn't deterministic—it is emergent. It isn't "me" that wills some reality into existence. It is the substance of the universe willing reality into existence. But even if you take the "I" away, it doesn't take away the utility or reality of the will. "Free will" emerges, like "wetness" emerges as a quality of water.
"Free will…is the power of agents to be the ultimate creators or originators and sustainers of their own ends or purposes…when we trace the causal or explanatory chains of action back to their sources in the purposes of free agents, these causal chains must come to an end or terminate in the willings (choices, decisions, or efforts) of the agents, which cause or bring about their purposes. (Kane 1996: 4)"
That might be metaphysical, but I don't see any other way free will could operate - that is, if it exists.
Both articles address the combination problem. However, the one I linked to goes into more detail about it and in fact addresses two separate combination problems:
“The first is the combination of phenomenal experiences, i.e., of qualia. [...] The second problem is the combination of subjects of experiences.”
"shifting from evolutionary biology to quantum physics" - always a bad sign to find this, it just means some woo-woo explanation based on a very poor concept of quantum physics.
For a superb and rigorous account of the ontological basis of consciousness, and why it might be superior to panpsychism while being more in line with scientific evidence, check "The idea of the world" by Bernardo Kastrup (or any of his work/youtube interview). Really compelling case.
He used to work at CERN, and was the youngest executive at ASML, till recent when he decided to dedicate himself solely to philosophy. He's not your regular wanna be woo-guru for sure.
A nice summary from one of the main proponents of the pansychic approach, but curiously omits mention of David Chalmers and contemporary philosophy which the modern renaissance of interest in the idea owes so much to.
From what I remember Koch and Tononi measure consciousness in Phi ( and phi is complexity) I remember a conversation at Towards a Science of Consciousness conference about this. If Phi is measured in complexity you could make a glass window complex and that is conscious.
Also during Tononi's talk a guy walked through the isle and said something along the lines of 'Phi is the answer, Phi is god, Tononi is our savior'
Can you really make glass window that much more complex? It's still the same molecular structure with maybe a more complicated shape, but how it interacts with the outside world is still pretty much the same
>defining it is actually straightforward. Here goes: Consciousness is experience.
Doesn't seem very useful to me. A bit like brexit means brexit. I mean machine learning gains from experience of new inputs - does that mean the thing is conscious?
One of the stranger theories of consciousness I've come across over the years is that of John Grandy. His primary hypothesis is that DNA itself is the source of consciousness. He tends to self-cite (rarely a good approach and only weakens his ideas from the perspective of an independent observer), but comparing the ideas in OP's article with Grandy's has got me thinking.
The Pythagoreans believed that soul (greek: "psyche") was different from conscious sensation. Philolaus, for instance, wrote that the interaction of soul and body produced feeling. Soul referred to the immaterial nature of eternal reality — immaterial and eternal in the sense of mathematics. For instance, spheres and triangles are never perfectly instantiated in the material world, yet they are very real.
This I find fascinating — that perhaps a certain soulful software needs to interact with material phenomena in order to create feeling. I don't know that I believe it, but it is a sensible reason to believe that consciousness is not pervasive.
> perhaps a certain soulful software needs to interact with material phenomena in order to create feeling
In other words embodyment is a necessity for consciousness. The ability to explore, interact, make experiments, test theories, they all depend on having an able body to move around and a rich environment to explore. A body also brings necessities - the agent needs to work to keep itself alive, and has goals, positive and negative rewards. These are ingredients without which there would be no point for consciousness to exist.
Whether one shares Christof Koch's views on consciousness, panpsychism and or agrees or disagrees with the other postulates he makes in this essay - and there's a great deal to argue about - one would have to conclude that this is a remarkable piece of writing.
Koch not only writes from a position of possessing great knowledge of the subject but also he does so in a most coherent and lucid manner. Moreovr, he simultaneously conveying his own convictions with ease, eloquence and finesse.
Koch's analysis is certainly the most comprehensive of any short analysis of this subject material I've read, it was also the most understandable and enjoyable.
I've long pondered the idea that consciousness is inherent to all "things" - animal, vegetable, mineral; atom, planet, solar system - in that things experience _being_, whatever that means for a given thing.
A recent oral surgery gave this hypothesis pause. I was given Propofol as an anesthetic, and upon awakening had an extremely impactful existential experience. My very consciousness had been extinguished, instantly, as if by a lightswitch, and for 45 minutes there was nothing but oblivion.
If consciousness is inherent to being, then how could it so easily be nullified to the point of oblivion, and then brought back online?
He pitches the idea (which I'm poorly paraphrasing) that there's a relationship between the complexity of matter and the complexity of its aspect as consciousness. Smaller fields of consciousness merge with a common resonance to form larger more complex consciousness. Anesthesia or coma being states where those smaller fields fall out of resonance and the more complex consciousness breaks down.
I think that would be a question of memory rather than having a conscious experience though I think it raises the question of whether consciousness can exist without some mechanism for memory even if only short term.
There can be no oblivion if you experienced it. I would suggest reversing the idea that conscience is part of a being and instead suggest that consciousness is inherit in everything because it is everything. Within or without a being.
Pardon my inability to express accurately with words, but I most certainly did not experience oblivion. I am using the word "oblivion" to describe the state of absolutely no experience whatsoever. It was practically religious/mystical/psychedelic in that it truly felt that I had not existed at all during that time.
(And, no offense, I get the George Harrison reference, but saying that consciousness "is everything" begs the very question of evaluating panpsychism critically. I'm posting this because it is counter to my own longheld beliefs that consciousness is inherent to being.)
No offense taken. But isn't nothingness or no experience an experience? It seems you did experience something, that something might equate to nothingness or the void or oblivion but there was an experience? It sounds similar to "experiencing" a thought. It happens and we can all agree they do, but what is it to experience a thought? Can you smell, touch, feel a thought?
I didn't "experience nothingness"; I did not experience, full stop.
My consciousness did not exist. I had no awareness of the passage of time. There was no observer. No dreams. From my perspective, I teleported from a chair to another room, with an existential discontinuity in between. The only "experiencing" was after my consciousness was brought back online.
I cannot describe it to you sufficiently with words, and you likely cannot understand it sufficiently without ceasing to exist for yourself. Are the dead aware that they are dead? It seems, from my perspective, that for those 45 minutes, my consciousness was extinguished, not unlike that of someone fully dead.
(Not that I have first-hand experience being fully dead, of course! And, in a conversation about panpsychism, I suppose the experience of being a dead body isn't something to discredit as "nothing"!)
Separate the blank stage, from the actors and scenery. For something to fill and empty, you know there's a vessel. It is integral and unseparable. Feelings, thought, emotion, drama, will always change and are tools for seeking.
For small values of "consciousness". The author writes "Consciousness is any experience, from the most mundane to the most exalted." One could call that "input". Still, the author is a serious neuroscientist, not a philosopher. He did, however, start with a Jesuit education, which biases one towards thinking that humans are special.
I personally think that trying to understand "consciousness" should be deferred in favor of trying to understand "common sense", or "how to avoid doing bad stuff in the next few seconds". Once we have a handle on that basic survival mechanism, seen in all mammals, then we might be able to address consciousness. Also, we could build robots able to keep themselves out of trouble. Biggest unsolved AI problem right now. It's the basic reason computers do stupid stuff sometimes.
Trying to understand "consciousness" without the ability to emulate basic common sense results in philosophical tail-chasing. There's a lot of that around.
I got too much of this going through Stanford CS in the mid-1980s. This was during the "expert systems" period, just about when expert systems turned out not to be that useful. The philosophers were still in charge. One exam question was "Does a rock have intention?", which gives a sense of where the faculty was coming from back then.
(The reviewer meant "adduce", not "abduce". "Abduce" is just moving your limbs outward. The muscles that power such movements are called abductors.)
I agree about common sense and keeping safe. Without consciousness I would not wake up to eat something in the morning, and I would die in a few days. Consciousness keeps me alive.
I would recommend Llinás book "I of the Vortex" which explains a pretty interesting reason for the existance of "consciousness". Also Wittgenstein has some thoughts about it too.
While Tononi's theory is interesting, it cannot be a complete explanation of conciousness at any level; it does not answer the Hard Problem of Conciousness.
Fundamentally, we need to understand why we have inner subjective experiences that feel the way they do. It sometimes keeps me awake at night troubling over how we could even begin to cast an explanation for this intimately subjective phenomenon in the objective language of mathematics and physics.
As an aside to all the comments regarding a definition and defining consciousness:
It's possible for things to not be reducible to objective language constructs. The nature of subjectivity is that it can't be defined. I fear (at least in science contexts) we will chase our tails forever!
I imagine my consciousness as a communion of all my cells... a central decision-making council, if you like.
If my cells are in conflict or disagreement about what action to take (which I presume they often are), my consciousness resolves this by taking a decision.
As such, I find it likely that this sense and experience of consciousness is shared by all, or almost all, multi-cellular organisms on the same evolutionary tree of life.
I don't think so. Let's be logical - consciousness, what is it good for? It protects the body, keeps itself alive. Then you can't have consciousness everywhere. It needs self replication, evolution and learning in order to exist. You need to have agent and environment in order to have consciousness, an agent with goals and needs, just any rock will not make a decent agent.
I agree an evolutionary approach seems a good way of looking at the thing. Being conscious of what is going on around you is obviously an advantage over not.
Also from a how the brain works point of view you have billions of neurons recognising things in parallel and the data seems to narrow down from that to awareness of a small number of things which you can logically reason about. I'd imagine a lot of the conscious experience comes from that - the neural net highlights as it were.
Like if you're in the woods your pattern recogniser bits may be going there's a leaf there, there's a twig there, there's a bear attacking, there's some moss on the tree etc. and then the bear bit will get highlighted so you can think 'ah pepper spray' or what have you. The highlights being what we experience as consciousness.
It implies you get human like consciousness from that kind of mechanism so yes for a mouse, no for a carrot.
It also differentiates stuff going on in your brain that you are aware of and respond to but are not consciously aware of to that which you are. Say you are being chased by the bear and run. The logistics of running - path dips 2cm, raise left leg 5cm... you will not be consciously aware of because the highlights and logical reasoning bit will be busy with 'shit -there's bear what next?' type issues.
If you want to read a scientifically-based examination of our current understanding of conscious processes, I highly recommend: "Consciousness and the Brain" by Stanislas Dehaene.
Saying everything is conscious is exactly like saying nothing is conscious. To make distinctions, you need differences.
The confusion people experience around consciousness amounts to a language problem. We want nouns to refer to things, but nouns can equally refer to activities. What happens to your consciousness when you die? What happens to your breathing when you die? What happens to the speed when the car stops? If consciousness is an activity, then it can come and go, like sleeping can subside and be replaced by eating. The sleeping hasn't gone anywhere, there's nothing to go and nowhere for it to go to.
This sounds like the bottom up approach, i.e. that "consciousness" is more like a medium that's everywhere, even an atom has a bit of this consciousness, and when such small bits assemble together, a bigger consciousness emerges. In this approach, I'm tempted to equate consciousness with the electromagnetic field - it's this field that allows us to experience the world.
However human mind is something entirely different: it's a self-conscious something built on top of "raw consciousness".
I find the "individual atoms are conscious" to be kind of dopey, but I do like the idea that consciousness is a sort of gradient.
I would describe consciousness as the ability for an information processing system to model the world around it, and importantly, said information processing system's place in it.
As I sit here, my model of the world around me is humming along nicely. I believe I am quite conscious. My dog is sitting here beside me (awake) seems to be experiencing consciousness. My other sleeping dog is not conscious - perhaps it is dreaming, but that's not really modelling the world around it. And as we move down the scale, I become less and less convinced that various creatures are conscious. Birds? Sure. Fish? Maybe. Ants? Hmm. Bacteria? No.
At the lowest level, creatures that simply respond to stimuli are not conscious. But there's a lot of wiggle room between a bacterium and me. Right before I wake up in the morning, my model isn't really working. I would say at that point I'm not conscious. But within a few seconds, the model is running and I understand my place in it. That isn't an on/off situation. It's a gradient that I quickly pass through; becoming ever more conscious along the way.
And every night (or if I get a deteriorating neuronal disease and my neurons start to die off), the whole thing plays in reverse. My consciousness dwindles down to nothingness.
If you'd like to start to understand the topic and the issues surrounding it this podcast episode is a discussion between Sean Carroll and a proponent of panpsychism, Philip Goff
> Some distinguish awareness from consciousness; I don’t find this distinction helpful and so I use these two words interchangeably.
We treat everything as an object, even mental thoughts and experiences. When we think of awareness, we objectify that awareness using one of the sense experience. But consciousness transcends awareness and in consciousness exits awareness. Consciousness is not an object of experience and that is why it is difficult to understand.
I have the feeling of experiencing things. Is it not possible that such a phenomenon can be produced within a machine?
When I try to answer this question, after coding for decades I can’t tell you how this phenomenon can be possible within a Turing machine.
So it seems obvious to me that (a) brains must be machines and (b) a machine cannot be conscious and so I conclude that (c) I don’t know what I’m talking about.
Lol, I was thinking along those lines... we are talking about consciousness with language... which was created by it long before we posed the question. I'm trapped trying to explain to myself how explaining to myself is even possible without language which was created by that which I'm trying to explain with language.
Have you ever had a moment when your program was more complex than you could grasp? Consciousness is just too complex to grasp, not transcendent. It's physical like everything else.
I'm not sure if it is a "proof" of any sort, but I find the ideas in the माण्डूक्य उपनिषद् (Mandukya Upanishad https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandukya_Upanishad ) to be a very interesting point of view. This short text discusses the theory of four states of consciousness:
Waking \
Dreaming > Turiya ≝ pure consciousness illuminating these
Deep dreamless sleep /
We all start as single cells. When does the consciousness fairy come and turn the global workspace on? When neurons fire? Because no emergent property seems powerful enough to produce feeling — and because both sheep and snails seem to have different levels of feeling—i subscribe to the panpsychic view. For now.
What is feeling? It's an expectation of reward following some action and situation you are faced with. Feeling is dependent on the content, the "game" the agent is playing. It represents a way to evaluate good and bad actions in order to maximise reward. Thus, even though feeling is generated in the brain, it is not about neurons firing. Having a life, something to win or to lose will automatically be the source of feeling, the brain itself is just a component.
The claim that a more complex system is capable of a richer experience seems like exactly the sort of baseless chauvinism that the article begins by taking on. Also "richer" seems like it could use a definition.
I love this idea, and yet it seems completely useless, untestable, unfalsifiable. Maybe everything has experience. Maybe every subset of everything has experience. We can't know.
What does he mean by causal? The normal connotation kind of implies that you feel something if you are an organism that acts on the world. Or something.
Sam Harris' thoughts on free will in his books, app, and podcast transformed the way I think about consciousness. Alan Watts talked about the consciousness of a daffodil, and that too had a profound impact on my feelings about myself and the universe.
I don’t know but my guess is that both Sam Harris and Alan Watts are not science-based, peer-reviewed scientists. And the HR audience seems, to me, skewed in that direction.
I tried a lot of guided meditation apps like Calm, etc. None of them - NONE of them - compare with Sam Harris' Waking Up app. To call it an "app" does not do it justice -- it is a container of content, to which he and others contribute regularly. The theme for all content is always consciousness.
If you think free will exists, listen to Sam Harris's 1 hour series of audio on the topic. It will change your mind.
I wish we taught introspection and self-examination in public schools.
I have one problem with consciousness is everywhere argument. Namely, if everything down to ants is conscious - how lucky are we to end up experiencing the world as humans? The chances are just too small for me to accept it at face value.
How about you start with a premise that you're a drop in the ocean of consciousness which is eternal, imperishable – the ocean was always there and so it'll always be in future – what about if it's even beyond time because time is a construct of the mind and consciousness is subtler than the mind. Now you have infinite time to take different manifestations as per your desires.
Mind and consciousness are feeble while the universe is complex beyond our capacity to grasp. I don't think "time" is just a construct of the mind. If you do, then your mind must be God-like in powers.
Despite other comments dismissing this, I do think this is a compelling and humbling question.
I think its best answered with a few related questions to consider what makes us lucky:
1) Longevity clearly matters, but the relativity of it is hard to assess: some sea mammals with emotionally-rich lives live twice as long.
2) Quality of life clearly matters. It's easy to imagine (and hopefully you personally know some!) pampered pets who have it unbelievably good: tasty food and nutrition, regular fun exercise, a fulfilling social and family life, a sense of purpose, etc.
And on the other end of the spectrum:
3) There are untold numbers of us who pulled the short straw in life and have lives marred in tragedy and suffering -- if they even are "lucky" enough to live long enough to comprehend it.
I think some of us are incredibly lucky and very much in the minority. The "luck" spectrum in life is so both deep and wide that I'm perfectly happy accepting "consciousness is everywhere" in order to focus on the question of what to do with the consciousness (and unfortunate lack of it at times) I have.
I think this explanation goes a bit sideways - comparing emotional states and happiness, which is not directly related to consciousness.
What I am surprised about is not how sentimentally lucky I am, but how unlikely it is that my consciousness (which by the theory of consciousness being everywhere) ended up in the being that we consider to be "most conscious" (human). Even if I lived a very short life full of terror and pain - I still would be just as surprised that consciousness that could have been "planted" anywhere ended up in me - a human. And so the alternative theory of "only humans have consciousness" would be more attractive.
Sideways indeed! I agree. I think as consciousness grows and expands it becomes increasingly clear that what we call "emotion" is an inseparable quality of being conscious. The more emotion is denied (or suppressed) the more obvious its underlying presence becomes, as it becomes a massive, unconscious (and dangerous) rudder.
Personally, I find it astonishing that anyone could draw a line at humanity. For example, have you never bonded with a dog before? It's so blazingly clear that while there are obvious differences there are even more similarities behind how they think and feel. It's not just dogs: cows, pigs, and rats -- if you spend any time with them -- are obviously high on the spectrum. It's unfathomable that the line of consciousness is anywhere near being at humans alone.
My intent isn't to be insulting, but inviting! There is much splendor in connecting with non-human life, even if it doesn't have all the same qualities as human life :).
Point 3 is rather interesting. I’d even go as far to say that the ‘marvellous’ evolutionary end-result that is us humans is the result of relentless chiselling over millions of generations by tragedy, suffering and death. Perhaps the more aggressive the chiselling the faster the evolution?
Not quite - I find the hypothesis for "consciousness is everywhere" to be too hard to accept based on the observation that I ended up as human (assuming that humans are somehow "higher" than other being of course).
Or stated a bit fancier - the p-value of the null "consciousness is everywhere" is astronomically small, given this observation of me ending up as a human.
But you can forget consciousness and ask the same question.
The chances that the matter you're made of ended up making you is astronomically small compared to it just being random space dust or something. And yet it happened.
No no, I disagree, these are very different things.
The matter I am made of is nothing special - everything has same kind of matter so I am bound to have some of it. But the consciousness I have is very special - top shelf in all of biology.
Say bacteria are conscious. Here is how special this is: the number of bacteria on earth is estimated to be "five million trillion trillion". And there are ~7 billion humans. So the chance that I randomly end up as human, instead of bacteria is ~ 0.0000000000000000000001. And that is disregarding all other creatures.
It sounds like you're suggesting that you are a "soul" that was "put" in a body.
Try to see it from this perspective; your experience as an individual (soul) is a feature of the structure we call Homo sapiens. It's a characteristic of this species' brain structure, in the same way that the colors of a flower are characteristic of its phenotype.
It would be silly to ask, "What are the chances that that shade of yellow ended up on that particular daffodil?"
The notion of "you" being in a "body" is extremely difficult to shake. Even if it's intellectually approachable, understanding it intuitively is something else entirely, though certainly attainable through sustained meditative practice or a hearty dose of psychedelics.
Yes but - I am that consciousness. That makes all the difference between this comparison and the yellow color example.
The fact that I am "seated" in a human body is an argument for only humans having this feature or phenotype called consciousness, and against the "consciousness is everywhere".
There's no paradox here. When a lottery is drawn, someone has to win it and be left with the question "what are the odds?". Well, the odds that there will be a lottery winner in a position to ask that question is 1.
If someone wins a lottery we can then say "what are the chances of this specific person winning - they are very low" - that would be Texas sharpshooter fallacy, because the chance of _some_ person winning somewhere is high, we simply drew a target around the winner and restated the question.
But this is not what is happening. What is happening is more like you finding three tickets under your rug in the morning, checking the numbers and finding out that you won jackpots in all three, and then choosing to believe that they are winner tickets by chance (believing in consciousness is everywhere) as opposed to someone planting them there (only humans are conscious or some other similar explanation).
The key difference between the two is that in the second case there are no multiple possibilities - it's about one person - you, you either win or loose, so we cannot select "winners" after the fact in this case.
I think you're making a good point, but anthropic reasoning is hard so I'm still mulling it over.
What you're saying is that panpsychism implies a lower probability of you ending up as you, because you may have ended up as a conscious bacteria instead.
I'm going to tentatively disagree with that because the counterfactual of you ending up as a bacteria instead of a human is impossible, and therefore it doesn't factor into the probability estimates. Whether a bacteria can be conscious is besides the point. I may be committing some kind of Monty Hall fallacy, but don't currently think so.
The Veil of Ignorance is false if we're talking about physical reality.
The argument I am pondering over here is very similar to the one about human population, you might have heard about it, it goes something like this: "human population is now likely highest it will ever be and will be drastically reduced in the future, because if we were to be born as any human randomly we would likely be born during a period where there are highest number of people alive".
Sadly I don't remember the name of it, but this argument about consciousness is in the same fashion. Except the odds are a _lot_ more surprising when compared with the population argument.
It's the Doomsday Argument and I can see how you're applying the same logic.
Doesn't this logic also imply that solipsism is true? 1 observer is less than 7 billion observers and therefore more likely under the logic of the Doomsday argument.
Thank you for naming it, now I can see if there are criticism of the doomsday argument that also apply.
And I do see how this can lead to solipsism. In particular when combined with "Self-Indication Assumption: The possibility of not existing at all" [1] . Solipsism would be a theory that explains both - the doomsday original argument and this criticism.
An easy resolution of this doubt lays in definition. Do not mix up phenomenal consciousness with meta-consciousness or self-referential consciousness. Clearly, only humans are meta-conscious. Homo sapiens-sapiens, the man who knows that knows. It's our defining characteristic and leads to all sorts of amazing things are we can witness.
Mere phenomenal consciousness is anywhere _in living creatures_ so that even a bacterium can be said to be conscious (it reacts to light sources, for example, and is able to detect nutrients).
Short answer: no other creature has developed complex languages, written books or made art.
Long answer: there is a plausible argument that consciousness might be a gradient. Certain creatures might express some level of meta consciousness, yet still far from what humans can do. For instance, elephants, primates or even just a dog might express some sort of empathy or more subtle mental states that do not equate with the experience itself, which would be mere phenomenal consciousness, but they do not appear to articulate to themselves those mental states and do anything more than simple reactions with those states.
Ultimately the claim comes from empirical observations: there's an immense evolutionary gap between humans and everything else, so that we can plausibly claim that we are the only fully meta-conscious creatures.
This is a bit past me, I wouldn't define "reacts to light" as conscious. In that case my Roomba would be said to be conscious. To me it seems that one is either fully conscious (your definition of meta conscious) or isn't conscious. Otherwise I don't even see what this "consciousness is everywhere" statement would accomplish.
Probably anything that self replicates and has to fight for resources. Even a cell can have perception and behaviour. It's actually fascinating, but a network of DNA and proteins can function like a neural net inside a single cell.
To me it seems like consciousness can only be passed from one being to another. And since we are all just a collection of cells, and everything that we are is coded inside a cell. It seems to me that consciousness must exist at the cellular level.
1) Your brain cells are just a special type of cell. How these brain cells send and receive signals, interact and make connection, is coded at the cellular level. Software without hardware to run on, is just text.
2) You are born with certain conscious behaviours that you don't need to learn. This behaviour must be passed between generations using DNA/RNA. Therefore the coding for that later behaviour must already be present when you were just two cells.
So I guess it depends on how you want to define consciousness. It's a biological reality that once sperm meets egg, you will have all the genetic information required to create your central nervous system represented there. But in my mind, this represents the potential for consciousness, not consciousness itself.
In my mind consciousness implies self-awareness and subjective experience. You might then be able to say that a phagocyte has some rudimentary form of consciousness, because it has a "behavior" of pursuing and destroying undesirable bacteria and particles in the body, so it must have some level of "perception" over which entities are to be targeted, and which to ignore. But at that level you can trace the behavior to chemical signaling and sub-cellular machinery, and it's possible to trace the phagocyte's behavior to simple cause-effect relationships in terms of physics and biochemistry. So I think it's hard to imagine that a phagocyte has "experience" in any real way.
I think when we talk about human consciousness, the content on which our subjective experience operates includes things like sensory information, verbal information and memories. And these types of information have neural representations which are quite clearly understood. And even for the task of consciousness, which is to interpret and contextualize all the sensory information coming into the brain, you can point to a brain region like the thalamus, which contains inputs from your senses, along with almost every other brain region, and make a reasonable argument that this might represent the physical manifestation of what we call consciousness.
There are more neurons in your brain than stars in the galaxy, and each one of them is a chemical computer. I don't think it's so far fetched that such a system is capable of a computation as complex and nuanced as consciousness.
Yes but for the love of gods can you stop trying to become bees? AGAIN?!? Honey bees are not conscious. They use their hive for computation, it acts as half of one brain, for each bee has its own half.
I call bullshit. Could someone please explain what I'm missing?