Hacker News Reader

Comment by xmonkee | Hacker News Reader

I have not read the article but I would love to have a real debate with a materialist. All anti-meterial models will skew sightly mystical so if you have zero appetite for that I won’t bother. But I’d like to try to change your mind if you’re interested.

I’ll start: Consciousness has nothing to do with any sort of processing. Processing is “dead” in the sense of a desktop calculator. Consciousness is the “living” part of your experience - that which experiences. Any process is the content of experience, not the subject.

I’ll stop here for now.

EDIT: currently this comment is at a 0 score. If you disagree with me, please leave a reply and I will try to get to you, but don't blindly downvote me cause I'd like to talk to more people, that's all. I'm not some religious zealot, you can check my post history etc.

View on HN

You are simply defining consciousness and information processing in terms of alive and dead. If those are your axiomatic assumptions, you’ve already established the outcome before evaluating the issues.

Consciousness may be more than processing information, but it is definitely processing information. Perceptions go in, and decisions come out. Along the way we also form memories.

When we experience something, qualia if you like, it matters to us. That process stimulates us, interests us and often it prompts us to action. Those are all information processes. Stimulation is a signal. Interest and attention is metadata about the experience. Being prompted to action is making a decision. These are all intrinsically processes on and about information.

There are some experiments that suggest that human actions are not the result of conscious thought. Maybe you've heard about Michael Gazzaniga's experiments on split brain subjects. The most radical interpretation of the results is that our conscious thought merely constructs a narrative about actions it has no direct control of.

In other words, our brains act like a bunch of interconnected neural networks and one of them, the language processing part, tries to make sense of what all the others are doing, serving the only purpose of communicating with others.

I wasn’t aware of that research, thanks, but I do agree most cognition is subconscious. When talking rapidly, the words seem to just spill out from nowhere. Ideas simply spring to mind. We have no direct awareness if the cognitive processes that generate them.

We can reason consciously step by step, but it’s an incredibly slow process. It seems likely that consciousness has something to do with attention management and broadcast communication across brain regions and functions.

Which is part of the reason why I think LLMs are a big deal. LLMs talk like the inner voice, and their failure modes are strikingly similar to the failure modes of "gut instinct" / first reactions and "stream of thoughts". I don't think this is a coincidence - I think we may have stumbled on the main trick that makes biological brains work. I don't mean language here, but rather the use of absurdly high-dimensional latent space for representing relatedness.

Now, if the above is anywhere close to the truth, then taking it together with the research you mention suggests that LLMs aren't simulating or parroting abstract thinking and understanding - they're actually doing it, the same way we do. They just lack an evaluator/censor layer of conscious experience.

I agree with everything you're saying, but I think we just are referring to different things when we say consciousness. Take any qualia, and there are 2 sides to it: The object of it, and the subject of it. A red light is seen. In the seeing of it, there is the red light that is seen, and the seer who sees it.

What you are talking about is a black-box model of consciousness that only relies on external measurement. That is the correct scientific approach, but it comes nowhere close to counsciousness. Consider that maybe you are doing the same thing you think I'm doing. You have defined experience purely in terms of inputs and outputs. The experience is the input, the outputs are perception, volition, will, action, etc. But who's are the perception, volition, will etc? There is something that exists that gives essence to all these.

If this doesn't ring true at all, we can stop here. Objective language can only get so far when talking about the subject, unfortunately. Thanks for taking the time to reply.

Please refer to my reply to tekni5 for my take on how consciousness actually works.

If consciousness does not have any observable properties, why would you believe it exists?

I don’t just believe it exists, I know it exists, just like you know it exists, because you are conscious, because you are. Are you aware of your own existence? How can you know anything if you don’t know the knower?

There words may not make any sense to you right now, and that’s the limitation of objective language: we cannot point at the subjective without metaphor. But if this does sound like it rings a bell, lmk and we can talk more.

That's just handwaving. You haven't identified any properties of this thing you claim, just created a name without a meaning.

The observation of our own consciousness, that is its self recursive nature while we’re in a conscious state, is what makes consciousness special. With other observations we receive a stimulus, we perceive it, and we either act on it, or memorise it or forget it.

While we are doing so, we are aware that we had that perception, however we are also aware of our awareness of the perception.

So the observable property of consciousness is awareness of ‘consciousness awareness’ itself. This is not a paradox, we know how recursive functions work from computer science and mathematics so the concept of the recursivity of a process is logically coherent.

This makes our own consciousness the most observed property in human experience.

You've already fallen into several pits of failure, perhaps without realising it.

Firstly, "alive" and "dead" are very squishy words with no clear definition. You can mould them into whatever you please, but that's not a firm foundation for any kind of debate.

Second, you can't just state your position as fact. You say that "Consciousness has nothing to do with any sort of processing." That's not an argument! You're making an assumption, and treating it as an obvious thing we all agree on. We don't. In fact, it's the main point of disagreement. This is like a theologian assuming the Bible is true because God wrote it, but Atheists don't believe God exists.

"Any process is the content of experience, not the subject." -- this is too vague to respond to. It could mean anything.

Other than hand-wavey, vague things, you've only said one clear thing, which is to assume the outcome that you would like.

Materialists aren't just making assumptions. Tests have been done. Real, scientific experiments. We can (trivially!) alter consciousness through chemical, surgical, or electromagnetic means. Simple physical processes seem to underlie consciousness, and altering those processes alters consciousness.

Every teenager that has taken LSD or mushrooms can attest to this fact. Anyone that has taken a nasty hit to head can experience this first hand.

I admit my language is squishy. Sometimes it helps point to what I'm trying to point to. And I know where you are coming from, as someone who was a materialist for much of my life. We are simply talking about different things.

You are talking about the contents of consciousness - the things that get altered by physical processes. We don't need tests to establish that. When the sun rises, the contents of my consciousness change from black to orange, thus we know that physical processes can change the contents of my awareness.

I am taking about consciousness itself. When the sun rises, the sky is the same, even it now seems orange.

> When the sun rises, the sky is the same, even it now seems orange.

I don't understand what point you're trying to make. When the sun rises, the colour of the sky changes in ways measurable with physical devices and noticeable to animal and human eyes. It is not "the same" in any sense. Different photons traverse it, its temperature changes, ionisation of its gas molecules change, etc...

>Different photons traverse it

Yeah, but "it" is the same sky. The presence or absence of particles does not alter the sky itself. More accurately, space is independent of it's contents. Mind you, this is only a metaphor. Consciousness is not physical space. Just like physical space is the "space" of physical objects; Consciousness is the "space" of perception.

You share almost nothing in common with who you were when you were 5 years old. Even if all the cells in your body have been replaced, and all your thoughts and your way of thinking itself has changed, you are still the same person. It's the same consciousness. That continuity is you. You are that consciousness. Do you see it?

That’s the Ship of Theseus argument. I think there’s a reasonable argument that in fact we don’t have continuity of consciousness. Yes we are consistent persistent beings up to a point, but inky in the way that the ship of Theseus continues to be the same ship.

I think of consciousness as being an activity. It’s something we sometimes do. We don’t do it in deep sleep, or when anaesthetised. But when we wake up is it the same consciousness? We remember being conscious previously, and that memory accords with what we experience ‘now’, but is that the same thing?

I think it depends how you look at it. I drove my car yesterday. If I get in it today and start the engine, is it the same ‘running of the engine’ as yesterday?

> I think there’s a reasonable argument that in fact we don’t have continuity of consciousness.

One argument that just came to me now: we already know we don't have continuity of vision - we go blind during saccades. We just don't notice, because the brain is happy to extrapolate from the last visual inputs, or otherwise completely make up what we see, going as far as screwing with our perception of time to fake continuity of experience.

The same could be true for consciousness itself. Visual system is a proof that the brain can and does aggressively smoothen out discontinuous experiences.

> I think it depends how you look at it. I drove my car yesterday. If I get in it today and start the engine, is it the same ‘running of the engine’ as yesterday?

Exactly. It's a different "running of the engine" for the purposes of your typical conversation and thinking. It's a different "running" in terms of battery charge maintenance. It's the same "running" for general car maintenance. So, different/different/same. If you're on a trip, your engine dies, and you immediately restart it, it's same/different/same. If you drive your car after having it sit a month in a garage, it's different/different/different.

People sleep.

We’re completely unconscious when sedated or knocked out.

Right. But I meant other than sleep.

When we sleep or get knocked out, we are aware that we've been unconscious for a period of time. But there could be other cases where we effectively lose consciousness for shorter periods of time - seconds perhaps - and the brain produces illusion of continuity, in the same way we get blind during saccades and the brain masks it out from our awareness by synthesizing data and screwing with the clock.

> When we sleep or get knocked out, we are aware that we've been unconscious for a period of time.

Not always, at least not in the ways that matter.

When I was a teenager, there was one occasion when I went to bed at night, pulled the bedsheets over my head, and with no subjective pause or discernible change of subjective internal experience of my mental state everything became bright, I pulled the bedsheets away from my face, and it was morning.

Take one more step back. When you are in deep sleep, your mind is absent, and so are all sensations, but what is it that registers these breaks-in-mind-continuity? You are that host, that reality, that being that never sleeps.

Can you define the “minimum reproducible example”?

Which is the simplest organism that has this “living” part and which is the most complex organism that doesn’t have it?

In the sense that you are asking, I can't answer this question, because I don't know. Perhaps ants and up have it? idk, there is no way to know. There is no way to even know if other people definitely HAVE consciousness, I take it on faith. I can only KNOW for sure that I have consciousness. How do I know that? Because I am conscious of it. Is this circular? Yes. In fact, this is the ONLY absolute reality that I can positively assert, without reference to any other fact or axiom. The fact that I can think, or that I have a body, or that it's day outside, all of these first need me to be conscious. So, yes, it's circular, and it's true, and you know it's true that you are conscious. And you don't need process any information to know that you are conscious. It's prior to all that.

> Consciousness is the “living” part of your experience - that which experiences.

That's circular, what is experience, what is "that which"? I propose a simple definition - consciousness is what informs actions, and optimises actions to benefit the agent.

That's a concrete definition, without subjective elements.

Sure, but it entirely leaves off subjective experience.

It also defines Roombas, and even simple sense/response feedback loop systems as conscious entities. Is a carburetor conscious?

It's all in there. Consciousness decides actions, it's embedded in every action. Actions change the future timeline, there is consequence in actions, and they provide feedback. It feels like something because it matters how you react. You could die if you don't react correctly, for example.

I have some appetite for it. Either conscious is mere computation or it is not, and either branch should be explored. I think assuming that either branch is correct beyond a reasonable doubt is wrong.

Is there any material (!) you can link me to to explore further?

Look, there is more material about this stuff that perhaps any other subject explored by man, but it frequently comes in ecclesiastic garb and that may or may not be to your taste. I'll can link both spiritual and secular starting points. The spiritual ones are far more delicious. What's your stand on religion in general? I'll link sources appropriately.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com