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Comment by TheAceOfHearts | Hacker News Reader

How droll, isn't this the equivalent of trying to figure out how an operating system works by trying to look at activity on an encrypted SSD?

And how exactly is this a win for philosophers? I'm not aware of any philosopher having made meaningful strides within the subject either.

I'm sure once someone figures out how consciousness works it'll be irrefutable while seeming incredibly obvious in hindsight. Which, honestly, just makes it more frustrating that there isn't a full accounting already. How many key insights are needed to fully describe consciousness and how many do you think have been found? Do you think anyone in the past has figured out how consciousness worked and taken it to their grave because of how obvious it seems?

Maybe it's like searching for the Dragon Balls, and you need to put all 7 key insights together to figure it out.

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> isn't this the equivalent of trying to figure out how an operating system works by trying to look at activity on an encrypted SSD?

Not quite - an encrypted SSD is deliberately designed to be hard to understand, while the brain is probably not. It's closer to reverse engineering a very complicated and hacky software system, if you want a tech analogy.

> I'm not aware of any philosopher having made meaningful strides within the subject either.

This bet was about putting the burden on neuroscientists who claimed they were making pretty quick progress towards understanding consciousness. It's a bet on what would eventually happen, not a competition to see who's better.

These days we have a better analogy. It's like trying to figure out how artificial neural networks work by looking at their weights! :D

B can't really be an analogy for A if it is directly derived from A.

> Not quite - an encrypted SSD is deliberately designed to be hard to understand, while the brain is probably not

Who's to say that the difficulty in understanding how the brain works is a defense mechanism of sorts? Similar to how the blood-brain barrier exists as a defense mechanism. The wording "deliberately" can imply a pedestal that doesn't really exist, that places "deliberate" human design above "natural" micro-evolution that basically happened by chance. It would stand to reason that a more complex brain, that's harder to understand, would survive natural selection. Even the brains of tiny animals are quite complex in their smallness, they encode a lot of different knowledge ("instruction set" if you prefer), that enable them to do certain things that would take us a lot of manual "over-the-top" processing and calculating. For example, the ability for a cat to right themselves nearly perfectly when falling, given enough distance. Their brains can inherently calculate the exact amount of force, and the exact motions to take, to achieve the desired amount of rotation in three-dimensional space.

> Who's to say that the difficulty in understanding how the brain works is a defense mechanism of sorts?

I don't see why evolution would have optimised our brains for that specific goal. It's possible but it seems very unlikely, as there's no motivation for it AFAICT.

That is incompatible with how evolution works. Complexity is one thing, but there was no survival reason to hide (aka encrypt) the inner workings of a brain when they first came into being ~200 million years ago.

Nobody said it was a win for philosophers. It says it's a win for a philosopher (singular), and it is because he won the bet and therefore won a case of wine.

It is a sort of win for the kind of philosophy this philosopher practices. He thinks that there is more going on in consciousness than just neurons firing.

It doesn't really prove anything, of course. I actually don't think much of Chalmers' work. But it's very remarkable that the bet expired just as machines are coming tantalizingly close to being consciousness without qualia.

> consciousness without qualia

Isn't that a contradiction in terms?

And how do you know if they have/haven't qualia? :)

That was the question they were hoping to answer. We still don't know.

It could be double speak, but the obvious thing you understand from this formulation it that he won because he is a philosopher. Not that he won, and by the way he is a philosopher.

Anytime one philosopher wins, two other philosophers lose. And vice-versa.

And how exactly is this a win for philosophers? I'm not aware of any philosopher having made meaningful strides within the subject either

Seems quite an odd and dismissive thing to say. Pretty much every "stride" within the subject seems to have been made by philosophers.

Right. My two cents: trying to find the neural basis of consciousness is like trying to find the Rules of Baseball basis of the cutoff man.

It's an emergent phenomenon.

Clearly in the midst of your dismissive arrogance, you did not come across John Vervaeke.

Could you clarify what you mean? I don't think I'm dismissive nor arrogant. I've watched a Lex Friedman podcast with John Vervaeke but can't say I particularly remember it very well.

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