Are We Zeroing In on the Hard Problem of Explaining Consciousness? | Hacker News Reader

Are We Zeroing In on the Hard Problem of Explaining Consciousness?

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21 pointswallflower9 comments

I'm skeptical of any argument that attempts to explain consciousness, because there is no clear definition of what people mean when they use the word consciousness.

I'm currently taking a class taught by Marvin Minksy at MIT known as Society of Mind (named after his book), in which he addresses consciousness as a suitcase word which people use to represent a million different things that we don't have words to properly explain. This makes sense to me.

I highly doubt there is or will ever be a single theory that correctly explains consciousness, but rather there will be lots of different reasons for why we experience different feelings and awareness's which sum to what we consider consciousness.

The "hard problem of explaining conciousness" is discovering all the small biological and neural correlates. It's a hard problem in the sense that finding all the subatomic particles in an atom with a particle accelerator or sequencing the human genome is hard.

On a theoretical level, I think consciousness has already been explained and is not a hard problem unless you are using a hard definition. A state of consciousness is whatever neurons happen to be ON or ACTIVE in an arbitrarily small interval of time. The information held in a system at a current time.

A good example is the phenomena of hemispatial neglect. In this disorder, if a person suffers damage to say the right portion of their parietal lobe, they will not be able to integrate the left side of their world. People will only shave the right side of their face or eat food off the right side of their plate. If asked to draw the times on a clock they will only draw 12 through 6. One part of the brain is not allowed to activate, and the result is a radical change in conciousness, the lack of conciousness of the "left" side of the world. One patient as even stated that he didn't know why they called it neglect, because it implies there's something there that he was ignoring.

Perhaps when people say "conciousness" they are referring to "HUMAN conciousness" and that is a much harder problem. Again, I don't think it is so hard. The unique aspect of human consciousness, as to why we consider it more evolved than other forms of consciousness, can easily be defined as capacity for analogical reasoning. It isn't external tool use, as even crows are quite capable of this. Compared to other intelligent animals, humans are by far the most advanced at analogical reasoning, with bottlenose dolphins and great apes coming in a distant 2nd and third.

> On a theoretical level, I think consciousness has already been explained and is not a hard problem unless you are using a hard definition. A state of consciousness is whatever neurons happen to be ON or ACTIVE in an arbitrarily small interval of time. The information held in a system at a current time.

That's a wild simplification. At least you must consider that the topology of the neurosis different from person to person (and in large enough amounts of time for the same person), the fact that nothing is as discrete as ON or OFF in the biological world and the possibility (as far as I know not refuted) that some neurons might carry more state than a single bit. I don't feel, by reading neuroscience papers, that we're in any wau close to a real understanding of how brains (let alone human brains) work.

By On I meant active vs non-active brain areas, I did not mean to imply that an individual neuron is an information unit with the capacity of one bit!!! Information is not even stored inside neurons but is a function of their connections.

My statement is accurate. You can temporarily and manually activate and deactivate areas of the brain using trans-cranial magnetic stimulation and cause all sorts of interesting shifts in conciousness including out of body experiences.

"While the easy problem looks at correlations between brain activity and different states of consciousness — something that the global workspace theory is beginning to elucidate — the elusive hard problem of how these patterns of electrical activity could ever give rise to our subjectivity may never be fully solved. Dr. Laureys’ correlation of DMN activity to patients in a coma or vegetative state starts to show how the electrical patterns of the brain relate to “conscious” and “pre-conscious” states according to the global workspace theory, but doesn’t really come close to accounting for the richness of our inner lives."

So, no.

Exactly, and that conclusion could already be drawn after a few lines. Measurements on brain activity are never going to explain consciousness, because measurements on falling rocks don't explain gravity either.

Yeah by that quote this guy is still completely dualist and a bit silly.. Of course you will never explain how these patterns of electricity give rise to a seperate metaphysical consciousness. The patterns of electricity ARE consciousness. Any complex system could be said to have a degree of consciousness, just very few complex systems have a qualitatively HUMAN-like consciousness because they are not capable of demonstrating high-level analogical reasoning.

The whole notion of the "Hard Problem" is completely dismantled in 'Consciousness Explained' (1991) and then later 'Sweet Dreams' (2005), both by Daniel Dennett.

Highly recommended for philosophers who know about computer science, or computer scientists who know about philosophy.

Laureys sure likes the media spotlight.

Remember the coma guy who could supposedly communicate through guiding a therapist's hand on a keyboard?

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