I feel like a lot of people defend philosophy on the basis of transcendal sentiment, which says that says there ought to be something more to the world than the ground and the sky, as it were, usually phrased as the "meaning" or "purpose" or "nature" of something.

I understand the feeling. It's natural to probe. But what if it really is all just ill-defined sentiment? Why should we imagine there is something "more" there, that there is a "nature" of things beyond that which we can measure?

The principle of parsimony demands that we reject extraneous abstractions, and I don't see anything forcing us to acknowledge that the nature of reality is a legitimate object of inquiry as distinct from physics and math.

I want to try to reply, but I have the (possibly misguided) feeling that any attempt to penetrate the wall of scathing cynicism you've erected here will be met with just that. I apologize if that's unfair, just hear me out:

Going with the principle of parsimony - consciousness is arguably inefficient. I recommend some Peter Watts for fun sci fi inquiry into what a technically advanced species without consciousness should look like. So why have it?

Given that nobody can answer the question of what exactly consciousness is, why it developed, and how we could replicate it, I disagree that the study of consciousness has to be "looking for something more."

If the brain is "a wet computer" (and if you have time I do challenge you to support this statement), why is it seemingly non deterministic? Or is it actually deterministic, and we just don't have the modelling technology to sufficiently grab all the variables? I think I can predict your reaction - "of course it's deterministic! The universe is deterministic, and brains are just a part of the universe!" I think that is the inevitable rational point of view, sure. I'm not saying we need to leave room for a god... I'm saying literally, nobody knows for sure. So why not study these questions?

> If the brain is "a wet computer" (and if you have time I do challenge you to support this statement), why is it seemingly non deterministic? Or is it actually deterministic, and we just don't have the modelling technology to sufficiently grab all the variables?

I am slightly perplexed why anyone would make a big deal about apparent non-determinism.

Even if we assume there's no noise, the underlying physics is perfectly deterministic and we are in fact maxwell's demon. Then the brain is still a stateful, chaotic system. Being stateful and chaotic would mean you could never provide the same input twice and expect the same output because its previous state would also be its input. For any observer this would look quite non-deterministic unless you had a perfect model of ever bit of information in the brain. And currently nobody claims to have such a model.

And then let's add the noise, observer effect and quantum effects back in.

So really, it's not very surprising that the brain appears non-deterministic to any physically implementable observer.

But it is not particularly surprising. Not even good old silicon-based computers are fully deterministic. Apart from intentional noise inputs (hardware RNGs) they also experience things like cosmic rays flipping bits, electrons occasionally tunneling out from capacitors or flash storage when we don't want them to and so on. Simply overclock your computer and the rate of non-determinism will go up dramatically, but that does not mean it is zero at stock frequencies, just low enough to be usable.

I think consciousness is something of an accident, like so many things in the world. It seems to be useful, perhaps something like how it’s useful for a crow to be able to bend a metal wire, put it in the glass bottle and hook the food that the intelligence researchers cleverly placed inside the bottle. The world is shaped in such a way so as to reward such things and maybe conciouness is rewarding on a meta cognitive level, like solving certain problems become easier with a consciousness. It doesn’t seem independent of the world, but rather is, and we are, a reflection of the world’s sensory input. The world has hallucinated an image of itself.

When consciousness lights up during a lucid dream, the sensory perception is real enough so as to be confused for the real thing. Maybe the real thing is something of a dream. When Shakespeare wrote, “We are such stuff as dreams are made of” in The Tempest, that seems to me to have been not far from the mark.

Here's a link to Blindsight, the Peter Watts novel mentioned in the post above. It can be read in browser or downloaded as a e-book. It is (IMO) well worth the read.

http://www.rifters.com/real/Blindsight.htm

Jesus..I thought that title sounded familiar. I bought this book off Amazon for like $3 a few months back but couldn't get past the first few pages because the .mobi version is ridiculously horrible. Thanks for the link!

> Going with the principle of parsimony - consciousness is arguably inefficient.

Why is that? Very unobvious conclusion.

Peter Watts tells it better than me, but basically, looking at studies that show the human body reacts to, for example, a baseball flying at its face before the conscious parts of the brain even get a signal from the brain stem, one could argue that there's not really a point to the conscious brain at all.

This alongside the idea that bacteria or trees proliferate just fine without it, etc etc. This is the jist of my argument, if you want a way better analysis, please read peter watts, he is smarter than me and the work is already done.

For defending against flying baseball it may be true, but there is very little chance we could build society, economy, etc. where flying baseball exists without conscious parts of the brain.

I read Blindsight(3 times actually), and he described some end result there, skipping whole evolution process, in which that alien Intelligence (Rorschach) may or may not compete with conscious creatures.

Additionally the hypothesis that Rorschach doesn't have conscious or not managed or directed by creatures with conscious is just guess of that expedition, which doesn't really understand what Rorschach is.

From another hand, evolution on Earth demonstrates that conscious creatures (humans) completely outcompete all others.

If you consider a question that you lack the tools to answer “ill defined”, then yes, the world is pretty easy. But perhaps there are sensible questions which you lack the tools to answer. What are we to do about them?

I mean: what would an answer even look like? At what point would questioners be able to say "Yes. That's it. That's the nature of consciousness!"? What would constitute even a partial answer?

You should be able to answer things about it:

Is it a fundamental or emergent property of the universe?

What is the smallest/biggest structure possible for a consciousness to happen? (we should be able to tell what is conscious and what is not)

Can/do laws of physics account for it? (consciousness is not a necessary thing in physics, we are all p-zombies for physics laws, but for some reason it is able to affect the causal chain, as we are talking about it)

This alone tells me that "consciousness" is an ill-defined term.

> Can/do laws of physics account for it?

Either you define the word in such a way that they can, or the discussion becomes meaningless.

I think fundamental point often missed when discussing this topic (and similar philosophical issues) is that a thing can be either measurable in principle (even if not with our current understanding or technology), or it doesn't exist and there's no meaning in asking about it. I arrive at this statement through following chain of reasoning: there is no sense talking about things that do not impact observable reality in any way, since the world will be identical with and without them (and thus there's no way to assert those things exist, as opposed to e.g. an infinite family of similar-but-not-quite-the-same things). And if a thing does impact observable reality, then - in principle - we should be able to observe its impact, and that opens it up for measurement and understanding, and thus puts it squarely in the domain of physics.

So for the term "consciousness" to be meaningful, it must be defined in a way that it makes a physical difference in the world. Some bit in a brain must go to 0 if you have a consciousness, whereas it must go to 1 if you are a p-zombie. If there's no possible way to - even in principle - differentiate between a conscious mind and a p-zombie, it implies that both terms are nonsense (and also useless).

INB4 uncertainty principle - it doesn't mean there are things that can't be measured hidden behind some "quantum veil"; it means that this is where our usual conceptual models (like position and momentum being separate qualities) break down and no longer correspond well to reality.

Fundamental or emergent? What does that even mean?

Like nearly everything else in reality, you’d expect consciousness to be continuous, not integral. We know there are diminished states of consciousness by experience and observation. As such there wouldn’t be any lower limit on size of conscious objects, just smaller and smaller degrees of consciousness.

Yes, the laws of physics of course account for it. Everything that exists arises from physics.

Do you mean the laws of physics that can only ever be abstractions of our subjective experience?

No, I mean the laws that would still be making planets orbit the sun even if none of us were here to experience it, and indeed which had been doing for billions of years before we were here.

It depends on if you are happy with the state of things as they are. I would think that if all of humanity was content, and not a single soul was unhappy then we would stop the analysis. But so long as our minds can imagine a newer 'better' reality, i.e. so long as the grass is always greener on the other side: We will act this way.