Hacker News Reader

Comment by toohotatopic | Hacker News Reader

Two things that don't fit:

1) Even if electrons have consciousness, why should it be linked to our consciousness?

2) Why is decision making the essence of consciousness?

The Schroedinger equation is just a model, not reality. There doesn't even have to be an undecided state in reality. But even if the universe is conscious and decides in every moment, that doesn't explain our consciousness. If everything is conscious, in an ever increasing density why don't we have several consciousnesses in our head? Why is our stomach not conscious?

And even if we are not free to make decisions, we could still be conscious in the same way that we watch sporting events without intervening. Actually I would argue that we never decide. We always 'choose' the most preferred option that deterministically depends on our state of mind. And yet, we are conscious.

View on HN

We do have several consciousnesses in our head, which end up acting as a collective and then the left brain interpreter post-rationalizes the behavior as if a single mind is at work. That’s why we act against our own decisions so often.

You can see this demonstrated with people with split brain syndrome, where the brain halves are unable to directly communicate and you can trick them out by confronting the speaking left brain with conflicting actions by the right brain. The left brain will invent an explanation on the spot.

https://physics.weber.edu/carroll/honors/split_brain.htm

Do people with split brain syndrome have an internal “stream of consciousness”? Or two? I’m not sure what the right word/phrase would be but I’m talking about our internal monologue or narration.

It's complicated. Corpus callosotomy, also called commissurotomy, to relieve seizures was not designed for the purpose of creating completely non-communicating hemispheres. Every patient is different. And so on. There is a long list complicating factors and a longer list of possible factors. My guess is that it adds up to it being really difficult to make two truly separate consciousnesses, and that observations of these patients see interesting effects but they are still one mind.

Another example would be simple dreaming. The "you" experiencing the dream is indistinguishable from a conscious being (normal you) at least to itself. It has thoughts, feelings, sensations, and experiences. There can also be other people in your dream, and you can sometimes converse with them. Yet (unless you're dreaming you can read minds) your dream self can't tell what these other dream-people are thinking, even though they're all part of your mind. And they can be indistinguishable to you from conscious beings.

> your dream self can't tell what these other dream-people are thinking, even though they're all part of your mind

That's a great proposition! Nevertheless I'd be more inclined to believe that these dream-people are not really thinking, and most likely don't have conciousness, as they're stimulations of our visual perceptions slightly modified in some sort of dynamic/interactive manner and mixed together with our memory and recollections.

Yet you (your main dream self) perceives them as conscious. They pass all the tests for being real, thinking beings. They respond like real people, at least much of the time. So how can one tell if they're thinking or not?

A fun speculation about similar things is found in the Neal Stephenson novel "Anathem," where consciousness is a manifestation of the many-worlds interpretation of QM.

The notion in the novel is that most "forks" are imperceptible, but forks in a brain result in outsized impacts on the physical world due to the tight interconnectivity of its neurons / circuitry (i.e. the normally minuscule difference in electron spin could cause an entirely different neural pathway to be followed, resulting in the conscious entity taking different actions and thus greatly impacting the world in tangible ways). It is the susceptibility to this cascading effect that somehow results in "consciousness."

It's probably baloney, but it's a fun read with some interesting things to consider :)

> The Schroedinger equation is just a model, not reality.

Maybe.

> Why is our stomach not conscious?

When I am hungry it certainly seems like my stomach is conscious. Indeed, they have found neurons in the digestive tract.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com