Comment by robmclarty | Hacker News Reader

Comment by robmclarty | Hacker News Reader

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First, argumentum ad hominem (if you don't know what that means, you can read about it here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem).

Second, my background is actually in Cognitive Science and Artificial Intelligence which includes Comp Sci., Psych, Psycholinguistics, Linguistics, and Philosophy. That is to say, I've put some serious thought into these issues and am not making opinions willy nilly.

Third, personally, I want to be able to explain the universe in terms of neat physical laws and mathematical formulae. But I don't think (at the moment) that what we have (yet) sufficiently explains what's going on (especially in terms of consciousness).

The common "explanation" for what consciousness is (usually put forth by materialist-determinist science) is that it simply emerges from a certain complexity of matter (put enough genes and DNA and neurons together and, bam, consciousness). I just feel like that begs the question. If we're going to explain what consciousness is I think we need to do better than that. That's all.

My intention wasn't to attack you at all, so sorry if I offended. I was just trying to think from your shoes based on what is in your profile. I didn't knew you had a background in C.S.

In that case, it's even more interesting, to me, that you think like that. Given your background you certainly know about neural networks, and what the simplest models are capable of. You probably also understand how emergent and apparently random behavior can arise from well define frameworks (Rule30, prime numbers distribution). It's intriguing to me that in light of evidences like that, it's still required for consciousness to be explained by something other than emergent behavior.

And I don't think "put enough genes and DNA and neurons together and, bam, consciousness" captures the issue. That may produce a machinery like the brain, but doesn't necessarily produces consciousness.

My hunch is that consciousness is the convergence of feedback loops and the perception of boundaries, allowing the distinction between myself vs. environment, and that should be conditional of a certain structure. I believe we'll be closer to understand consciousness by trying to reproduce it.

Cool. First of all, just let me say, that arguing about consciousness today has been very exciting and fun. Thanks for participating :D

My position is not the norm, for sure. I used to think along the lines you're describing (some sort of Churchland connectionism or dynamic system), and was driven to find a way of reducing consciousness to something that could be reproduced in a computer. But the more I learned the more I saw the gap between neurons and experience. I don't know for sure if it couldn't eventually be explained with some future advanced physical/chemical/biological theory, but right now there seems to be a big gap.

If we could look at all the pieces leading up to experience under a microscope, I still don't think there would be a way of seeing someone's experience or subject it to proper scientific scrutiny short of actually being that someone. That is, I don't believe that any set of facts would ever allow me to know what it's like to be someone else.

I think the monism Nagel describes in the book I linked to is an interesting idea of how things like consciousness, cognition, value, and intentionality can be compatible with materialist realism while still being something different without necessarily deriving from divine intervention or subjective idealism.

> If we could look at all the pieces leading up to experience under a microscope, I still don't think there would be a way of seeing someone's experience or subject it to proper scientific scrutiny short of actually being that someone.

See... but if you take a connectionist approach, it should in fact validate your intuition that you can't experience like someone else short of being them.

Making an analogy with neural network models, you can't transfer the weights from a network to another with a different structure and expect it to produce the same states. The experience imprints in the structure, and from that structure emerges the experience. And that's a ridiculously simple model, with ideal neurons and nothing else in the organism modeled... imagine the richness of behavior of the real thing.

I don't know... maybe it's our bias to believe matter is messy, filthy and mundane and that our consciousness, all the richness of our thoughts and emotions can't be explained only by it... but I actually find no less fascinating to think that is from structure alone that may arise sentient beings capable of living and breathing and feeling, out of the same atoms you find in the dirt.

Asking for a better level of explanation is not at all similar to staking out room for an extra-material homunculus type consciousness. "Put enough protons, neutrons and electrons together, and bam, bread" is a poor explanation of baking, but not so poor as to warrant skepticism on which fundamental particles we are eating.

Nagel has an almost myopic view of the 'experience' in my estimation. His classic claim that a human could never experience bat flight starts by pondering about the possible structure of bat consciousness, and is in the end justified by the physiological differences. Yet somehow he mysticizes the impossibility of experience transfer. As for your grandpost about experience, perhaps you are conflating the experience with the description (thought experiment: have you ever been able to isolate the feeling of an electrical signal in your brain?).

I have a similar background to yours, and for a while I was kind of stuck in a Nagel-Dennett-Russell sort of place that felt like it was probably correct but lacked any sort of richness that living through consciousness provides. My recommendation is to dive into the rabbit hole of continental philosophy. Deleuze has a great radical materialism (inspired by Spinoza?!), and wonderfully blurs psychology and philosophy in A Thousand Plateaus. Heidegger has an exploration of the experience of language being the bootstrapping tool of consciousness in Being and Time. And some psilocybin never hurt.

Haha, yeah I've dipped my toe into continental-heidegger-psilocybin-phenomenology and it's wonderful Being. I'm still trying to answer WTF (in general). I haven't read Deleuze. Maybe I'll check him out next!

I'm feeling like the more I look for definitive, objective answers, the more I'm pushed towards things like art and aesthetics; human expression, shared being, and culture. Those things seem more real to me than quantum mechanics or string theory. I'm not sure what to make of it all, or that anything can be made of it at all, but something sure is happening, and I feel, simply, that I want to be a part of it and play with whomever will join me :)

It's all atoms bumping into each other, designed by Darwinian evolution working over a period of 3.6 billion years to design mechanisms so complex that describing and simulating their complete interaction will be the work of generations. Along the way new physics theories may arise, but that won't change anything about the fact that it's all Quantum Mechanics. Just like you can have thermodynamics without knowing the lowest level of interactions, or in fact like Darwin was right about evolution without knowing about DNA.

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