If you're meditating, how do you know that you're meditating without having, at minimum, a working short-term memory? If meditating actually disabled your memory, wouldn't you immediately forget that you were meditating and stop?
All I can say is, try meditating sometime and you will see. (I don't recommend mantra meditation, but rather something more like Vipassana or "mindfulness" or any meditation that is not about distracting your mind by keeping it busy).
When you become comfortable with meditation, you become very aware of what your consciousness is doing. You gain a palpable sense for the present moment. Once you have that, it makes a lot of these kinds of questions unnecessary (or at least the questions become very different in nature). If you don't have this taste for the present, then asking/answering questions like this is like trying to explain colors to a blind person. It just doesn't work because most of the questions are about things that don't really have anything to do with consciousness.
> the point is that unconscious processes can be explained without hypothesizing consciousness
This really doesn't make any sense, by the way.
To borrow Metzinger[1] et al.'s terminology, this internal model of what consciousness is may not be very transparent to us (much in the same way why we don't have good intuitions why/how it is that we have notions about solidity and classical (in one or other sense) mechanics (it is useful to have an image of a solid tree/obstacle when running through a forest while being chased by a tiger, and all that.) We may have some intuitions, but those intuitions may turn out to be wrong.)
[1]: A very interesting book I'm yet to read: http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/being-no-one
Working memory can hold a limited number of things (usually said to be 7), whereas short-term memory has a larger limit in capacity and time. These are both temporary systems that feed off each other and rely on the larger long-term memory to give meaning and context to the "symbols" they contain.
Everything is interconnected, so making definitive statements about any of this is hard.
(IANANeuroScientist but my work does Neuroscience research)
So, are such states hallucination? Every person (human being) knows for sure that they are real.
I believe meditation is pulling focus into the present moment, but I also believe that moment is far from discrete.
Ultimately, the idea is that the state of 'here-now' (whether arrived through practice, observation or heck even induced through means of substance - though there are differences) is the state when You are not your mind anymore. So in that sense, looking at above suggestion about memory, I would simply ask: what is the need of a memory?
(It's terrifying what your brain does in sleep....)
Give me a break. Would you mind sharing what makes you more qualified than the author to "observe consciousness" and come to conclusions regarding the requirement of memory? I'd say it's a "red flag" when a game designer on hacker news throws out unsubstantiated attacks on an extensive well-written rational analysis about the physical manifestation of consciousness by a prominent MIT physics professor and cosmologist.
Additionally, I think you are quite clearly wrong. Consciousness does require memory. It is not possible to observe, experience, or process without memory, all of which are required for the integration of consciousness. Even to perceive requires memory, since it requires the integration, filtering, and processing of large amounts data into consistent perception and a conscious interpretation thereof - none of which is instantaneous and all of which takes time, requiring memory.
I had the exact same thought. It's understandable that people want to disagree, because it's not in their logical realm, or they find it's out of their scope of normal and accepted, but that doesn't mean that it's wrong at all.
When someone comes over that negative, to an author who has put so much effort into the paper. One would find it fair to have an equally professional, detailed and long answer. Imagine a time where everybody has the power to publicly "try to refute" your paper with a tweet, absolute horror.
For example, the paper nowhere conflates consciousness and memory. Instead, the paper repeats the suggestion that a requirement of consciousness may be the ability to process a substantial amount of information. This idea is related to the idea of memory, but it's not really the same.
The paper is not about describing the biological experience of consciousness at all. This paper asks the question: "Is there some way to understand from the Hamiltonian and density matrix of our universe that it should contain consciousness?"
Tegmark then proposes some criteria that are probably necessary for consciousness to arise and then presents some metrics for the various criteria and calculates those metrics for various conditions. The paper is really describing a framework for how consciousness can be considered in the context of a physical representation. The calculations should be relatively straight-forward to follow for anyone with a decent memory of their linear algebra class.
To put it another way: If you had a Hamiltonian and density matrix that described a universe that you thought contained consciousness, what kind of things would you calculate for that Hamiltonian and density matrix to try and find out if it did or didn't? This paper suggests some ways to think about this question.
So I don't understand why this comment spends so long talking about "observing consciousness."
What is there to celebrate about half-baked philosophy dressed as science and published?
Philosophers and theologians have spent the last two thousand years not agreeing what consciousness is and there is no clear consensus now. That's not really surprising - all the seemingly "basic" qualities people perceive - say lightness, darkness, wetness or coldness, are very "high level" compared to what we know about the real states of matter
The argument that consciousness is a state of matter because consciousness is something we intuitively perceive is something of a throw-back to the "four elements of matter" thinking - the prescientific system where matter is organized by its perceived properties in contrast to any serious investigation of the causes of those perceived properties.
> consciousness is independent of something like memory.
I'm not going to say you are completely wrong here but where is your proof?
For example: It is an easily observable phenomenon (e.g. by anyone who meditates) that you can be conscious without remembering anything. In other words, consciousness is independent of something like memory.
Yet Max's list on page 3 has stuff like "independence", "utility", "integration" which have nothing to do with observations of what consciousness is actually like. Rather, they are more like high-level ideas of what human beings are like.
But we don't need to explain human beings (complex biological organisms that walk around and do stuff). Science has got that covered already, at least kind of. So if you are going to clearly think about consciousness, you need to factor out what consciousness really is and look at the properties of that.
This is supposed to be a foundational principle of science: that your hypotheses are attempts to explain things that are actually observed. The first step is to observe things carefully! You don't just go making up hypotheses.
So it's a giant red flag any time a scientist writes a paper about consciousness where they conflate it with memory in some way (which is almost every time). It's a red flag because it indicates that the scientist has not actually spent any time observing consciousness, because they aren't noticing things that are obvious to people who have done that.
(You might think that because we are all walking around conscious every day, there would be no need to observe consciousness, but this isn't true. We walk around in a space governed by Newtonian physics, but it took until Newton to figure out this thing called inertia and that a frictional force is required to make things stop, etc, because if you don't look carefully and make careful measurements, most of the everyday world doesn't appear that way at all. Same thing with consciousness.)