Comment by trevyn | Hacker News Reader

Comment by trevyn | Hacker News Reader

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We know exactly how to quantify it: When you have a network of neurons that is connected in such-and-such a way, where the neurons behave in such-and-such a manner, and are in a given initial state and evolve over time, you have what we call consciousness. I don't think anyone has a falsifiable objection to this.

I think one of the underlying problems is that people want a cold, objective quantification of a word that is inherently emotional and subjective. So when the objective definition does not align with the emotional experience, they dip into mysticism or philosophy, neither of which is testable science.

Really, the word "consciousness" is not a scientific word, it's kind of like trying to quantify God.

Can we test a being's self-awareness, decision-making ability, etc.? Yes. Is there something "consciousness" that is not testable? Then that part is not science. We can really really want it to be science, and keep looking for ways to test it, but until we do, it's just conjecture. (Personally, I think that once we're able to model brains that we agree "are conscious", all of this feeling of mystery will fall away.)

I'm uncomfortable with that for the same reason I'd be uncomfortable with "if you connect rocks in such-and-such a way, you have a computer." It's not a very enlightening explanation.

Don't some rocks contain silicon, so really pure and doped rocks make a computer.

Exactly, and even if nobody has ever built it or written a formal proof that it would work, you can still imagine how it would work and prove it to your own mind.

(This would work for a purely mechanical computer made out of rocks, too.)

Personally, with enough knowledge about how modern AI works, and a reasonable understanding of the neuroscience literature, I feel there is no fundamental mystery to consciousness, only awe at the level of complexity harnessed.

That's the point. While the explanation might be technically correct, it is in no way precise enough to call it understanding.

Thank you for that concise but clear explanation of what I always felt was lacking with many over-scientified views of profound subjects like consciousness.

We don't push back those models because they are "uncomfortable", make us feel bad, or inferior, or anything like that - but because they are simply non-functional! There are many aspects and phenomena in the world, in human interactions, in my own consciousness - which are simply not explained by the reductionist view! "Based on some complicated network of neurons" is not good enough! I clearly have these phenomena and experience, and this "complicated network" explanation just gives no explanation at all really! While other less scientific models do.

I'm like "sure, I can accept whatever science you can give me and become a fully logical being, but don't ask me to ignore obvious phenomena that I know I have and experience, that is just stupid!".

Your understanding of the reductionist view may be incomplete; it is very functional and there’s no need to ignore phenomena.

Less scientific models can be simpler and functional, but that doesn't mean that they’re more correct.

In some areas reductionism is, most certainly, the best possible model. I just think it takes much wisdom to discern the areas where it is and where it is not.

People often mean different things when they say "reductionism".

Sometimes they mean that the phenomenon under consideration is always reducible to a common set of basic physical underpinnings, which is something for which we have never conclusively observed a contradiction.

Other times, they mean to say that the phenomenon in question can be well understood using a lower level set of abstractions than we initially considered and that there is no need for further abstraction. This is observably not true, i.e. the workings of an internal combustion engine are not practically modelled by combining a model for each of its individual atoms.

I think consciousness might eventually be reducible in the first, but not in the second sense. Of course, crude initial models don't explain a lot, but I don't think that has much bearing on a thing being reducible.

Why do you assume that every aspect of the world can be understood as "testable science"? What basis do you have for that belief?

In the same sense one could say that people on your side of the argument are simply "uncomfortable" with the notion that not everything can be understood logically and predicted, including big important things in their own life, but also the larger truths of the universe. And so instead of looking at the other experiences and data, which don't fit into an understandable paradigm - they tend to ignore or deny them.

If your model is not capable of making predictions and being tested, I predict and can test that your model is providing you emotional stability and a comforting perception of knowledge despite a lack of actual knowledge.

I agree that many people tend to “over-science” and ignore inconvenient data, but this is not a core component of the basic scientific method. In fact, many of the most useful predictions are probabilistic in nature, and so you would expect the data to be fuzzy and the models to be imprecise in the early stages of formation.

I was not arguing against the validity and efficacy of the basic scientific method.

Scientific method is a great tool - for the tasks that it can handle. I can argue that there are many tasks which it cannot handle. Areas of knowledge which cannot be studied with scientifid method exactly.

Another limitation of it is obviously that it needs a hypothesis - which means it requires a preconceived notion of the world, before any testing can actually take place. Which means that the tester is responsible for the basic paradigm and worldview, from which they ultimately produce the hypothesis to test, to begin with. Obviously, the scientific method is less proficient in handling these preconceived prejudices and worldviews, because it comes in after they have been already applied. (It can help indirectly by verifying the hypothesis and perhaps sort out some worldviews, but it can naturally not create a new worldview by itself.)

So what happens when there are multiple hypothesis from completely different paradigms that show some evidence? Or what happens when there is a hypothesis which you just cannot disprove directly? This is where other paradigms ultimately come in.

I suspect that the question of consciousness is ultimately one of these questions, where we will need help from many other areas, before the scientific method can ever be applied here. Before a testable model can even be conceived.

In the absence of any evidence to the contrary, its a good working hypothesis. In a sense, the attitude that the study of consciousness is not a respectable scientific pursuit is a denial of this point of view, and this article is a celebration of the fact that this attitude is no longer an impediment to such studies.

Denial that there is something yet to be explained is as unscientific, in its own way, as claims that science can not possibly provide an explanation.

Or the problem could be that if it's really not physical, then the current physical methods of testing can never be close to precisely defining it. Sometimes, we need an out-of-box thinking, non-linear jump in our methodology to solve a nagging problem.

What is a non-physical method of testing?

What do you mean with "not physical"?

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