I realize this could be true for a lot of other schools of thought, but it seemed especially prominent when arguments about what makes a person seem to rely on a lower-level assumption of how the brain works.

What's left as "philosophy" is always the stuff where we don't even really know what questions to ask. So we kick them around for a few centuries, or millennia, in the hopes that something will eventually take on a shape that can be pursued in a better-defined fashion.

This process has a name : The Great Conversation [0]. Bit presumputious to me to think Plato would have any clue as to what we're saying, but it is a good name for a thing.

[0]https://philpapers.org/rec/MELTGC-7

EDIT: Some links to the new tools mentioned:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nb07TLkJ3Ww (optogenetics)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UKbrwPL3wXE (crispr-cas9)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L3bSx4TBs6M (clarity)

> The real answer is that we don't yet know enough about how the brain works...

I don't think the "problem of consciousness" is one of missing empirical evidence so much as simply a fuzzy (ill-posed?) question. Though enough evidence might be sufficient to forcefully dissolve an irreal question. On the flipside, a lot of the current ML research does a good job at addressing consciousness by breaking it into concrete, communicable actions.

Instead of asking, "What is consciousness?" try asking, "What actions could XYZ take that would convince me it's conscious?" A related question is "What actions (in minute detail) are involved as I believe/think/feel I'm conscious?" Those two questions are similar, but tend to evoke quite different sets of "external" experiences and actions.

It might turn out that there is some mathematically invariant property of things that are capable of acting as convincing conscious agents, a la the physically precise definition of heat turning out to behave kind of like a phlogiston. In such a case, we might in fact find a "thing" that deserves the label "consciousness"---such as Hofstadter's idea of a strange loop---but for now I think the term is used pretty much used in a way that's synonymous with "magic".

I think we can define a generalized version of what we call a "conscious thought" as a thought that can be "consciously reflected" about. With "conscious reflection" I mean using some representation of the thought as an input for another thought in such a way that the new thought, including the usage of the original thought, can be used as an input for another thought in the same way. The representation doesn't have to correspond particularly closely to the execution. (We remember to think in natural language, but maybe the thought process is just converted into natural language after the fact for the purpose of saving and reflecting.)

Computer programs can also be conscious according to this generalized definition if the process of executing it is saved in some way and can, depending on the circumstances, be used in some way, which is saved in the same way.

That different "ways" of using a thought as an input for another thought are possible means that there can be different consciousnesses in our brain. One of them (if there are multiple), which is the one responsible for our output, at least on a higher level, or does at least significantly inform the output, is what we call "my consciousness". The reason why we don't know whether "my consciousness" is responsible for the output, despite having the appearance, is that it may be mostly a "post-hoc rationalization engine" for decisions made on another level, possibly for other reasons. But it does at least inform the output, since thoughts of "my consciousness" in the past inform our later output. For example, if we are asked about our past thoughts, we talk about the ones that are remembered in "my consciousness". This is the thing that puts it in such a special position compared to other hypothetical consciousnesses, which don't inform our output in this way, and are therefore invisible to other people, and obviously also to "my consciousness".

(Answer since edit doesn't seem to work.)

I wasn't aware ML had anything to do with consciousness.

> In such a case, we might in fact find a "thing" that deserves the label "consciousness"---such as Hofstadter's idea of a strange loop---but for now I think the term is used pretty much used in a way that's synonymous with "magic".

So you consider your experiences of color, taste, pleasure, etc. to be akin to "magic"? Because those sensations are what make up our conscious experiences.

What does a good answer to this question look like in this context? Genuinely curious what they were looking for.

Imo the real question is whether humans have intentions. It seems like if you look at it rationally, we're just collections of chemicals reacting with each other. Set the initial conditions and then the whole thing is deterministic. It's pretty uncomfortable to think this though, so I think it's best if we avoid the subject.

Imagine you are on a rollercoaster: you know your course is pre-determined, but you can't see too far ahead, and it sure is a fun and surprising ride along the way.

If quantum physics theories are correct than there's always some amount of pure randomness in the game, making it impossible to create perfectly deterministic and repeatable system of any significant complexity.

The real answer is that decisions exist in a different frame of reference. Some philosophers are stuck in a model in which decisions were taken by the soul, an inmaterial entity. So if decisions are generated by physical processes, they're an ilusion.

But that's as idiotic as it can be. Our brain is a material system and of course decisions are generated by physical processes inside it. The interesting question is how much of us is malleable and how we can make our decisions to change ourselves and our own decision making process.

Good level design is basically when a player traverses a predetermined path while not feeling that he is on rails...

Example og good level design, Half Life games. A player Traverse the world as if they can go anywhere but they always pick the right way.

Other example is Dark souls. Keeps you in a loops so you never hit a "dead end"

This reminds me of Sam Harris' book "Freewill", I recommend it to the people who believe in freewill.

By the way, what determines the whole chain of deterministic events?

Also Elbow Room, or, better, Freedom Evolves.

I once read Dennett's critiques and I remember I didn't find them very convincing. But right now I don't remember his arguments. I won't analyze them right now as to be able to comment in this topic. If you mention Dennett's main argument against what Harris says about freewill I'd thank you.

Marvin Minsky said we are 'meat machines'. What does Dennet say against that? (considering machines as deterministic).

I'm afraid I don't remember the exact contents of the Harris/Dennett debate; I should probably reread it myself. :)

any kind of freedom at all, emerges from the layers upon layers upon layers that make up the existence of what we call a living creature.

I don't see why layers upon layers would imply freedom. A complex Java web framework may have layers upon layers of abstractions, and that may make its operation hard to understand fully. But that doesn't mean it isn't deterministic.

Spinoza wrote: Men are mistaken in thinking themselves free; their opinion is made up of consciousness of their own actions, and ignorance of the causes by which they are determined.

But there's just nothing that I recall in that book that suggests or even hints at any reason for this to result in a subjective experience. And I don't believe it rules out an electron having a nano-unit of subjective experience, for example.

The book suggests that something is a subjective experience if an organism can report it as one, and goes to great detail about what's going on in the brain when an organism is able to report a subjective experience, and makes the very reasonable suggestion that something is probably a subjective experience in a brained organism that can't report it as one so long as it exhibits all the same patterns in that organism's brain (infants, other animals).

But I don't think it does any work at all to show that there is no subjective experience in plants, or rocks, or even nano-units of subjective experience in individual electrons. It can't do this, because, as far as I recall, there is simply no progress on the problem of why this global activation in the brain would produce a subjective experience.

Also, just because someone reports having a subjective experience, doesn't mean that they actually have one. I do have subjective experience, but I have no way of telling whether someone else has one, even if they claim so.

I don't believe you. ;-)

Sorry.

I know it sounds outlandish but it does point the gap in your proof.

Unfortunately all our word definitions seems shaky, if we want to describe something that is the base requirement of those very definitions.

Maybe the best we can do is to deconstruct the above using more simple or base terms, but the meaning of those terms maybe also depends on the content of experience not the mere fact of experience:

I experience thought -> experience of thoughts exists -> experience exists -> something exists

So upon experiencing thought you may conclude that "something exists", or "there IS something"...

Of course you can. You know it to be true that you posses consciousness because you experience it directly. What is impossible (empirically) is knowing that about anyone or anything else.

In a similar way, "I" can say that consciousness exists, and is taking the form I call "my perspective," but that's about all.

We know there is thinking. There is no reason to believe that subject-object duality has any basis in reality, or that any individual, including our "self", has a sufficient delineation to consider it an independent entity.

Regardless of whether there is a "you" or if it's some amalgamation of state that is loosely bounded together and "fooled" into thinking it is a unity, something is there experiencing. At least in my frame there is.

This isn't something you can prove because it comes any sort of structure capable of doing proving. It's just something that's a given and you start from there.

Descartes' "Meditations on First Philosophy" is the originator of this idea. While it is dated, the form of its principal argument hasn't changed.

With regards to conscious unity, there is at least a weak form of it in the sense that you can't experience others' experiences. While it is possible that your own experience may not be fully unified, it is (very likely) disjoint from others' experiences.

https://www.cbc.ca/cbcdocspov/features/the-hogan-twins-share...

I've never been very moved by ideas that I can't know or share other people's feelings, or other fanciful ideas like their blue is my green. It's more reasonable to assume they are like me because we share similar hardware (DNA) and software (Culture). Others hands look like mine, more or less. Others legs are like mine, more or less. And so others perception of green is like mine, more or less.

Telling me that my experience is prime, or fundamental doesn't tell me much. Similarly, saying I think therefore I am doesn't tell me much. What then am I and what is existence? I think therefore I am only as much as I think I am. And sometimes I forget myself.

If we imagine there's a God and I could ask any 1 question about the brain and get an anaswer, all I would need to ask is:

"Hey God: w.r.t. the human brain, are there any special shenanigans like is connected to a soul that's responsible for consciousness, or is it WYSIWYG, just a bunch of cells and that's it?"

Luckily for you, there is no God and I can answer definitively: no, there are no shenanigans. It's just some cells and that's it. I am telling you this definitively. There are no metaphysical shenanigans going on in the human brain.

Note: you might wonder why, for this answer, I decided to phrase it in terms of asking God. The answer is in order to activate the natural scientist's reaction "that's silly, God can't tell you there's no God like that". Well, brain metaphysics is exactly and equally silly. It's just some cells, that's all.

There isn't any evidence that there is anything happening that's not biological despite 1000's of years of searching for that evidence.

And there is all kinds of evidence that biological processes can explain our experience. More all the time.

It's not definitive in the sense that we're anywhere near completely understanding our biology.

But it's the most likely explanation, given what we do know, but such a huge margin that there is no real alternative explanation outside of mythology.

Do you consider software in a computer to be mechanical? You could record the 1010101 in an electricity stream and conclude there is no meaning to that electricity beyond getting from point A to point B in a chip.

/s

If we're looking for something supernatural like a soul, then we shouldn't expect to see natural evidence. Thus the lack of that evidence does not imply its nonexistence. Relevant xkcd: https://www.xkcd.com/638/

Sure you can say that our lack of evidence means nothing since we don't have the capability, through natural laws, to acquire that evidence.

But that's just another way of justifying faith as a rational argument.

The only reason we have to believe in the supernatural is mythology. And the only reason we have to believe mythology is faith (and fear).

yes but it didn't.

see how silly that sounds.

so on one level sure you're right, on the other hand it's obvious. no, there's obviously no super transparent cord going off to soul land. it's just a bunch of sell-contained cells. It's not wireless. It's not even networked. It's just limited to within your body. You can literally plunge yourself in water and still think.

you have no cord going off into ether. you are nnot a networked component. you are just a bunch of cells in one little package and that's it. That's you. your output is what your body does robotically (move, make sounds) your input is sensory. and your consciousnes is whatever your braincells are doing.

> there's obviously no super transparent cord going off to soul land.

You make it sounds extra silly by using this type of language. Remember when hardcore scientists were saying "my dear you must be mad to think the earth is round", or "yeah OBVIOUSLY the stars are pinned to crystal spheres, they can't just fly, that would be silly".

Anyway, the only thing we can be sure of is that we just don't know. Everything else is simply stories we tell ourselves to make us feel better. We play little games, but not all games offer the same experiences.

what do you think the chances are of finding a small metaphysical soul organ in the brain, that connects us to the ether where all the real consciousness happens, is?

Give a percentage chance of that happening.

What if your base assumptions are flawed ? The current materialistic approach is based on flawed 15th century intuitions. Just like the previous assumptions were based on other flawed intuitions (gold can be made from any element, stars are on crystal spheres, earth is the center of the universe, &c.)

What makes you think our current assumptions are the absolute truth ?

--

okay so now what are the chances that I'm God and really just said that? If you said anything over 0.00000000% you're totally wrong. There is no chance of that because it's stupid. the above paragraph is obviously satire, because it's stupid.

You are presuming that the physical is all there is to existence. You fail to consider the possibility that there are portions of reality that we don't have the physical capability to perceive or the mental capability to truly understand.

There's a difference between saying "there is no evidence of X" versus "there is no evidence of X, so X is impossible"

I estimate 0.00000000%. What's your estimate?

I feel that consciousness itself is something non-physical. Whether it be a specific cocktail of neurotransmitters working in concert to give us the characteristics that we attribute to sentience, or a "core" form of existence that exists outside of our physical existence, I don't know, and I don't presume to know. I also don't presume I should be going around and acting like I can say with complete authority and accuracy "X doesn't exist in any way, shape, or form, because there is no evidence". I mean, what of the many other "scientific facts" humans have revised and subsequently rejected over a few millennia?

Isn't it the other way round, though?

They were twiddling their thumbs back then because they had no other option. There was no way to do machine learning back then. I've played with perceptrons on '90s hardware and it was basically just a toy.

And then Moore's law opened the flood gates some decades later.

It wasn't so much "thumb twiddling" though, there was a lot of work being done on systems which were more focused on knowledge representation (like Cyc [1], which still exists). Also a lot of work was being done from a more Psychological direction (mental models, scripts etc) and from a physical/neuro-science direction (brainz!).

These were all happening simultaneously and it wasn't clear (partly because of the MIPS issue you mention) that ML was the winning pony (for now) and I still appreciate the broad spectrum of knowledge covered in my particular Cognitive Science program.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyc

And don't forget Minsky's decimation of neural network research at the start of the 1970s [1], which led to major research centers like MIT ignoring them completely.

[1] https://www.edge.org/response-detail/26629

[1] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/200033859_Parallel_...

My first thought: Depends on if the rock is magnetized.

It's equally clear that most of what we associate with consciousness, such as thinking, awareness of the body and the moment and time and decision making and ... doesn't exist either. Because time and time again studies prove that when a decision is made (this is well studied in traffic for instance) there are no conscious reasons. Reasons only happen afterwards.

Is it therefore such a stretch to say that consciousness simply doesn't exist until long after the fact, and it is only once we ask one of these bags of mostly water to explain themselves (or ... well when we ask them something) that any trace of consciousness, at least the way humans understand it, is actually forthcoming ?

Consciousness is a trick. A learned trick. Human minds are not conscious and it is most definitely not a certainty that they, even when born fully formed and healthy that they will become conscious (read the reports on children raised by animals. They are old, sometimes 20 years old and they most definitely aren't conscious, not even on the level that a primate is conscious. The 12 year old boy they found in the wild in France never learned to speak only to articulate 2 words).

This is weird, because this is not most humans experience. Everyone around them always had consciousness. But let's compare. Everybody who has kids realizes that memory, firstly, isn't actually memory. We are very much not storing events when they happen in our brain. We learn a trick, because our parents keep referring to our past and "what we've done". We learn to calculate back from our current state of mind to what happened before.

That and of course philosophers have a millennium or 3 of history of ... philosophers getting consciousness wrong. Consciousness has been accepted in history to be being religious, to being able to rhyme, to composing music, to being able to talk and explain ourselves, to being able to love, to convince a professor (via chat) that you are conscious, to solve problems (all kinds), to walk around, to play chess, to ... all of these are now of course considered wrong. Why ? Mostly because things that definitely aren't conscious, from little dumb tricks, even mechanical contraptions in some cases, to rule based engines, to deep learning and now reinforcement learning algorithms can do this.

So can we please just conclude that whatever this article claims is ... wrong ? Just wrong. Nothing of value, other than perhaps interest a few people for stories with enough alcohol present. The current consensus seems to be that more details will be forthcoming the first time a reinforcement learning algorithm gets far enough to explain it's actions. So you want to know more ? Start there.

However, I think the article is simply suggesting to invert this assumption about physical reality. It proposes that for something to be "out there", you first need an "in here" (rather than afterwards), i.e. an experiencing of forms. This would be consciousness. At this point we are not even talking about decision making, thinking, memory, intellectual pursuits... Just subjective experience. So everything you're taking into the discussion regarding how thinking and decision making and memory happens is really a bridge further; not immediately relevant to the point the author is making.

I understand if this line of reasoning feels uncomfortable. You were literally pleading people to think that this is wrong. I think that is a mistake. There is value in challenging your assumptions, even if only philosophical with ethical/moral ramifications.

Since a person can tell what they experience and what they do not, the distinction between conscious experience and unconscious processing must have a base in physical reality (brain activity). With sufficiently advanced technology, one could analyze the brain processes and see which processes are associated with the reported conscious experience.

The fact that not all brain activity is associated with conscious experience in no way implies that conscious experience does not exist.

Conscience is not present during the physical exercise. Upon completion, when conscience describes it, it injects itself into it. This is the trick.

And how exactly does that back calculation happen?

You'd have to give definitions of consciousness that don't include human contact, don't include language, symbols, any human other than yourself at all, or any thoughts at all not related to short-term survival, don't involve realizing you (as a human) are obviously not a wolf, ...

It also means that there is a period where you can be taught consciousness, and clearly if it doesn't happen before 7 years of age, you will never learn it.

It does seem clear that language assists consciousness in most people – e.g. most people report experiencing an internal narrative. But some people don’t. And even if everyone did, I don’t think that would be strong enough evidence to conclude that language is required for consciousness.

1) (extreme) autistic person that doesn't speak, but can, and arguably thinks too abstract, rather than not enough : yes, conscious. Probably more conscious in some sense than "normal" people, whose consciousness is more a group thing, or at least less independent.

(also: not speaking is a pretty extreme form of autism, certainly not something you'd see in your average school)

2) person that grew up without ever having any reason to learn symbolic or abstract thinking ? No, not conscious

But it's going to be a sliding scale thing. By some measures a cat and a dog are conscious because, well, because they are certainly capable of making humans think they are suffering (and therefore they both think and feel, which is where consciousness definitions are going on now. Fish, for instance, are not). This seems to me a really bad way to define it but it's certainly widely used.

Didn't all organic life arise from inorganic molecular structures like rocks?

As a result of the theory of the big bang, molecular structures have progressively evolved in complexity, eventually becoming so complex that the boundaries of physics and chemistry are transcended into biology, life, and consciousness.

This suggests that "rocks" -- inorganic molecular structures -- indeed have "intentions" to the extent that they are primordial building blocks of consciousness

There are entirely separate theories to explain how that matter, after it arose, interacts with itself to give rise to chemistry. Then there is the origin of life, which is another problem. And then we get to evolution, which is how the initial life modified itself to become the species we have today. And then we have a bunch of other theories that explain how the brain operates.

Any one of these theories could be wrong, but that wouldn't invalidate any of the other ones. Some of them we have much more data and certainty on then others. But the only people that talk as if they were the same thing are creationists, not scientists.

What do you mean, "the same thing"?

Are you implying the evolution of matter into chemistry into life into consciousness is not an interconnected process?

Just because it's hard to define the lines between inorganic life, simple life, and sentient life, it doesn't mean there's no distinction.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuum_fallacy

... and prescient life. Don't forget the next stage on from sentience. The line between sentience and prescience also seems blurred, given how many humans nowadays report having flashes of the future.

The real question is not consciousness, but why the laws of physics are perfectly tuned for its existence.

The Anthropic Principle rightly points out that the question of "why does the universe support life" is fundamentally circular.