Comment by cerealbad | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cerealbad | Hacker News Reader

position yourself as an alien observer who happened to have evolved trilobozoan radial symmetry. you might have conceptual models of two separate oppositions and a third (their constant mixing) and build corresponding mathematics to reflect your biological nature.

or perhaps some parasite or virus which requires a host body. in which case you must concern yourself with your own survival, the survival of your host and the stability of the host/virus system, often tending towards co-dependence to ensure future generations. these types of entangled systems are how life tends to really operate, from the dust mites on your skin to the bacteria in your gut it's a giant complicated mess of competing and cooperating hierarchical dependencies which are taking a rather more risky route towards increasing entropy than an icy comet orbiting our sun every few thousand years.

human cognitive experience is a tiny sliver of the humanity engine, and often breaks in quirky ways- see drugs.

One doesn’t need to go to the trouble of imagining oneself as an alien observer to do this. There are many examples closer to home.

Many migratory birds have a sort of fifth sense (I don’t recall the nomenclature) that allows them to “feel” the earth’s magnetic field, and do not have the the red-blue-green combination for their primary colors - the world view of a bird and a human in a skyscraper looking down at the scenery below/around would already be significantly different.

Or fish, for example, it’d be interesting to imagine life in the water, moving around at the flick of a tail.. The point being, one’s experience of reality is highly dependent on the physical apparatus one is equipped with.

But if one wants to understand what layers can be peeled off conscious experience while still all the while continuous, then senses can safely go out the window. All one is left with is pure thought fueled by memory..but even memory can be inhibited by different drugs. Pure thought lacks space..lacks sense of self. Can even lack time..no order of thoughts..just an oscillating jumble.

Pure thought is the ultimate nature of consciousness because it has the fingerprint of the universe - interaction - without referencing it -- only manifested by it.

A bunch of machine learning neurons on my computer have no notion of anything lest I feed it to them. But calculation -- ie. interaction - they are given..and based on. In fact, giving them sensory input about the world is nice but isn't the inherited notion of computation, calculation, and information/memory/storage much more fundamental and genetic to this universe? Not some specific form like a curated data set?

Everything in this universe has the mark of its laws and ultimate fundamental nature. But I think the simpler systems show much more of an imprint.

Pure thought is one of the most distilled fingerprints of the nature of fundamental interaction of this universe.

> All one is left with is pure thought fueled by memory

> Pure thought lacks space..lacks sense of self.

I think this is stretching the definition of 'thought' past the point of meaninglessness. If you remove all interaction with the rest of the universe, any closed system will still have self-interaction.

And if you take it to the extreme, any collection of matter can be seen to 'compute' some function.

Which one of those systems 'thinks'? All of them? Every sub-system of every system?

Yes.. Computation is the grand aesthetic.

Are thoughts necessary to consciousness? One can be consciousness yet not be possessed of any thoughts.

Thoughts in a human's biological apparatus are essentially neurons firing off in the brain, e.g. replaying an incident stored in memory. A computer can do much the same thing, with different apparatus of course, yet it’d not be considered conscious. Not that it couldn’t be (it could well be possible for a lifeform to be constructed of circuitry, it just isn’t (yet) known if or how), just that it wouldn’t be.

If the above is indeed true, it’d be inferred that consciousness is of the nature of consciousness itself. If the abstract notion of thinking can be reified either in a human (biological) form or an electronic form, it stands to reason that the only thing different between the two must be that which distinguishes the human from the machine, i.e. consciousness.

Thus, in the paradigm of “thought” in this discussion, all consciousness is, is the awareness of the process of thinking, or of the thoughts as they come and go. Because a thought cannot be considered to be aware of itself, it can only be the object of awareness, the subject being the consciousness manifested in said human. The same reasoning applies to paradigms other than “thought”, e.g. “experience”.

A computer with sensors can detect itself falling to the floor, as can a human with their senses. An appropriately programmed computer can even take preventive action (e.g. some hard disks disconnecting/parking the head) as can a human, by virtue of their instincts/memories. But a computer would not be considered to be conscious of the fall. Only an entity in possession of consciousness can be considered to truly experience things. So neither thoughts nor senses are determinants of consciousness. Nor are they of the nature of consciousness. Only consciousness is of the nature of consciousness, everything else is a simulation thereof.

It is a coincidence (or part of a grand design, for the theologically inclined) that the particular configuration of matter in a human supports the manifestation of consciousness. It is questionable if all life forms are indeed capable of consciousness. Equally questionable if there can exist varying levels of manifestation of consciousness. Plants, presumably would be at the lower end.

Self awareness is not a prerequisite for consciousness..even awareness goes away on strong psychadelics. I think computation and thought are pretty much the same. Every computation requires consciousness to be performed..an observer.

Awareness doesn’t exactly go away on strong psychedelics. If it did, how’d one be able to make the recollection of strange things happening. There’s some primal level of awareness remanining to observe that the majority of the motor and cognitive functions are impaired. How else would one be able to “remember” that one was indeed “unaware”? Being aware (after the event) of having been unaware (under the influence) indicates there was some lingering awareness remaining.

If any system that retains memory of downsampled inputs has consciousness, then consciousness must be caused by calculation plus memory. This makes a lot of sense.

Yes, it makes sense, kinda.

What doesn’t make sense is a computer also has calculation + memory. So is the computer conscious?

If the answer is yes, then okay, computers are conscious and the only reason they don’t feel pain (etc.) is the lack of appropirate sensors and the lack of programming to process the input from those sensors.

If the answer is no, then consciousness must be something separate from both calculation and memory.

I think human bias will play a large role in whether one answer yes or no above.

"some parasite or virus which requires a host body. in which case you must concern yourself with your own survival, the survival of your host and the stability of the host/virus system” I’d really like to agree. But arguably, humans are dependent on the earth for their survival, and yet the evidence suggests minimal concern for the stability of the planet’s ecosystems. Many viruses also end up killing the host system, often leading to the death of the guest viruses themselves..

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