Why can’t the world’s greatest minds solve the mystery of consciousness?

I distinctly remember first learning some basic laws of Newtonian physics in high school, and leaving school that day dumbfounded. If all particles behave in a deterministic fashion, how is it that these particles bouncing around in my head can lead to the perception of free will and agency? It was a question that would pursue off an on for most of the rest of my life. Arriving at college, I dove into psychology with a passion, hoping that understanding the biomechanics of the brain would give me some clues. I turned to computer science and was instantly drawn to AI. I read everything I could get my hands on on the subject, with Daniel Dennett and Douglas Hofstadter being favorites of course (I still revisit Godel Escher Bach from time to time). I even experimented with various psychedelics looking for that elusive insight that would explain things.

Now I'm in my 40's and of course I still don't have "the answer". I'm not as consumed by the question anymore, focusing instead on just enjoying my days on earth here with my family and friends.

But how on earth anyone can belittle the question of consciousness blows my mind, so to speak. :)

My thoughts on this article:

1. The fact that we cannot scientifically determine how something functions does not necessary imply a non-physical cause.

2. Thought experiments are inherently limited to human conceptualizations which--while based in reality--have no authority over reality. Here's a famous thought experiment: Descartes believed that clear and distinct perceptions can be certain. I can think about a horse and a dog separately, so they most be different things, right? Well, I can also think about time and space as distinct entities but guess what they're not. Thought experiments are entirely limited by human intuition and human intuition is not guaranteed to properly reflect reality. The fact that you can imagine a zombie of yourself has no bearing on reality. I can imagine traveling faster than the speed of light but that doesn't make it possible.

3. When systems reach sufficient enough complexity it is impossible to understand them by merely analyzing the individual components and understanding the rules that govern them. Even if I had full knowledge of the human brain and how it worked, there would be no way for me to understand another person's first person perspective because there would be no way for me to simulate his brain. Mary's Room, qualia, and Mooreland's argument from first person perspective are all dependent upon the assumption that if you can understand the components of such a system, you ought be able to understand the whole. This premise is false.

4. There are plenty of "nonphysical" entities that we presume to have an entirely physical basis. Take the operating system on your computer. Is your OS a physical object? A physical property? It's real. You can interact with it. But if you pry about your hard drive you will not find a little desktop with folders and icons. Even if you could read the one's and zero's off the magnetic disk that wouldn't be considered your operating system. It only exists when all the pieces are connected and running and has no value (or existence) without such animation. Nonphysical entity. Physical cause.

Some reading: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halting_problem http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cellular_automaton

[Citation needed]

It's the same problem that AI has. AI is whatever a computer can't do.

A few decades ago the computer couldn't play chess, so chess was a good example of AI. Once the computers could play chess and easily wind a match against a grand master, the we can see behind the curtain and understand the tricks, and now chess is only a circus trick and no real AI.

For now, computers can't simulate consciousness, so it's a mystery and a good AI research topic.

"Not invented here" bias at its best.)

As someone in another comment here mentioned, the last time something that was not understood was nigh declared magic and unphysical or ignored even by educated men was in the 17th century, and the phenomenon was light.

If you accept panpsychism, the idea that consciousness is not limited to brains (examples: i feel and react to pain but my dog reacts to pain as well, and even certain trees are now known to release signal chemicals into the soil which cause nearby trees to harden their bark when they are damaged), and also accept that consciousness is a field/fundamental force that couples(interacts) with the other fields, and with matter, it becomes plausible to say that an interaction between two particles will also cause an interaction with the 'consciousness field'.

Of course all of this is complete speculation because it seems to be impossible to measure the properties of said field, as the proposed interaction would be one-way (examples: when i burn my hand with scalding hot water, a circuit in my brain/body which relies on known forces and interactions causes my hand to move away, yet i feel pain).

I don't see how wave function collapse, which has frequently been mentioned in connection with this, could be related, as it's not even known what wave function collapse actually is, much like our current problem with consciousness.

Disclaimer: IAAP

Using computer systems as an analogy, the brain is the hardware, the mind is the software code and run-time states of this system. Some of the software code was written by genetics but the majority of them are written after birth by the environment. Now there are two major differences between computer system and a human:

a: computer systems are Turing machines, humans are not. Human uses intuition to perform induction which Turing machine can not (because induction is not logic). And induction is such an important foundation of human understanding of the world that I believe a Turing machine's understanding of the world based on pure logic would be very different.

b: human minds is aware of himself, he can think about his own mind, and think about the thinking about his own mind. It is like if the software can model the software itself, without entering an endless recursive loop. That is fundamental property of consciousness.

My guess is that the fact that human mind relies on intuition rather than logic (non Turing machine) is the reason he can recursively think about himself while computer can't, after all he intuitively knows when to stop and jump out of the recursive loop.

And in fact, God (the theistic version) would explain this perfectly. Drop your materialistic assumptions for a moment, and hear me out. If God exists, as a being with consciousness and personality, and if he created humans "in his own image", then we are not faced with the Hard Problem of Consciousness. Humans can then be truly conscious, and have true personality, without those things being just a configuration of atoms.

The pantheistic version of God doesn't work as well, because it's ultimately impersonal (despite the "theistic" part of the word). There's no way in pantheism for personality to be anything more than an illusion, which ironically is the same problem that materialism has with consciousness.

The common accepted notion is that reality is made of small pieces of matter (ie. atoms), which in turn when then combined sufficiently gives rise to consciousness. Therefore its matter at the core, and consciousness arises from it.

Its quite possible that the order is wrong: Namely the universe may actually be composed on a foundation of consciousness.

Specifically, the idea is that consciousness is a force like all other forces (ie. magnetism, gravity, etc). However, this universal force of consciousness causes quantum-waves to collapse, hence why there is something instead of nothing.

The brain evolved in much like all your other sensory organs (eyes, ears, touch, taste) - in that it detects and can presumably interact with these naturally occurring 'force of consciousness'.

This explanation also solves many of the various quantum-physics implied paradoxes.

*typo: way -> why

The problem is that consciousness is goes beyond conventional logic and descriptions. Interestingly, if it could be grasped by conventional logic it would lose the characteristics of consciousness.

A similar (possibly related) question is why anything exists at all (including why even the concept of something existing exists!)

Unfortunately, having no intuitive insight, I cannot lay claim to an answer, but then notably other thinkers seem to agree that consciousness lies beyond what can be directly explained anyway.

There is an odd branch of logic which allows contradictory statements, possibly such a tool could be used to formally analyse some of the properties of consciousness.

It seems to me that there is a disconnect between:

- the standard scientific view of reality as consisting of fundamental particles and the laws relating them - and,

- the experience of being somebody, an experience that all of us have.

The standard view may well end up providing a good explanation of the experience (and some people seem optimistic that it will), but I don't understand how it can be dismissed. That's like saying that the EM spectrum of hydrogen cannot be explained by classical electrodynamics, and so is a non-problem.

EDIT:layout

Though no one takes Julian Jaynes seriously these days, but I think his ideas of the development of language preceding consciousness are as good as any other theories I've read.

http://www.amazon.com/Origin-Consciousness-Breakdown-Bicamer...

Quite a read btw: "Consciousness and the Social Brain", 2013, Oxford University Press

[1] http://www.princeton.edu/~graziano/Consciousness_Research.ht...

You are a spiritual being, aware of being aware. Consciousness is the state of being aware of being aware. It can be attenuated, and it can be enhanced, by the unit of spirit itself, represented in Scientology by the mathematical symbol: theta, which is used because it represents infinity.

Anyone wanting to know more can study the subject without getting into too much controversy - all it takes is to read the books about the subject made available in any library. This is the very thing that the subject is intended to explore and define, and it is a very thorough investigation indeed - covering everything from the most basic axioms of life all the way to applying the properties of theta in the modern, present time world.

But of course, the hubris and hysteria about the organization and its activities precludes an honest look at the real, very well defined, details of the subject. Get past the hysteria, and you will find a perfectly workable, perfectly acceptable definition of consciousness. However, that's not as easy as it sounds, alas, in this modern hubristic world..

Either that, or our species is just not evolved enough to comprehend the problem.

The answer is either A) Conciousness is the result of a physical process Or B) You are a Dualist, stop lying to yourself.

One of the very first things he does in that book is provide a definition of consciousness that he uses throughout the book. It's a more concrete definition than I've seen in most other places, and in part because it's very small. Like most others, I tend to roll my eyes a bit when philosophers start talking about how consciousness is the act of feeling and experiencing, and is the core of being, and is the sum totality of human experience, and start getting all mystic about it. Jaynes takes the opposite approach: it's not all and everything of human experience, it's exactly one specific thing about human experience.

Specifically, introspection. The ability to not just observe the real world, but to create a simulated world in our minds and observe that. Replay memories, or test hypothetical present or future situations. Anything else unique about the human mind is taken to be a consequence of consciousness, rather than a part of it.

Another big thing he does is show that activities that we normally think of as conscious and rational/intelligent are actually not taking place in the consciousness (these are backed by experimental evidence). For example, chess players get a lot of their performance from perception that filters information before it hits the consciousness. For another, decision-making is shown to be a pre-conscious activity, and a person's supposed line of reasoning is actually a post-hoc rationalization of the decision that the sub-conscious mind dumped into the consciousness (I forget the details of how this is demonstrated). The latter result is... disturbing, because it challenges your notion of free will. But the more I observe myself and others, I can't help but think it's true.

One major upshot of this: I think there's sort of an implicit assumption that consciousness is some sort of "higher form" of intelligence. Jayne's work casts doubt on that. It seems that consciousness interacts with intelligence, but most of our "intelligence" does not come from (what he considers) the faculty of consciousness.

Observationally, this seems to agree with the state of AI research, and the distinction between weak AI and strong AI. In fact, if one accepts his theories, then weak AI is actually just unqualified Artificial Intelligence, and what we currently call strong AI is not AI at all, but Artificial Consciousness, which should rightly be a separate field.

First we need to solve the problem of defining what consciousness is.

I assure you once we define it, the problem is solved.

It is consciousness asking itself how it came into existence, but existence itself means arising in the field of consciousness, as it is only in consciousness that the notion of existence can arise.

Dudes are going to chase their tails forever.

All I could think of was that these guys did not do much computer programming. Everybody who is doing programming has heard of the binary search algorithm. At school, you first are taught a computer language or two. Next you take a data structures and algorithms class. You can not pass unless you know and can write from memory the binary search algorithm.

In English, it goes something like this. Assume an ordered array of values. Also assume two indices's, initially at the beginning and end of the array. Pick the location at the mid-point of the two indices's. Is it the one we are looking for? If so, quit and return the location index. Otherwise if the value at the mid-point is greater than the search key, move the upper index to the mid-point. Otherwise, the mid-point value must be less than the search key and we move the lower index to the mid-point. Repeat until either the search key is found or the upper and lower indices's meet.

In essence, this is roughly how you search a phone book for a name. Everyone above the age of ten knows this algorithm.

What is interesting is that the algorithm is the same, no matter the language in which it is described. English, French, Algol or C.

The algorithm is recognizable as essentially the same in the unoptimized version described above or in an improved version where it is noticed that having once examined the mid-point, it is no longer necessary to consider it again and the indices's can be moved one location before or after the mid-point.

The algorithm is the same even in the human version wherein the pages of the phone book are searched without exactly choosing a mid-point. Instead, a rough estimate of the mid-point is chosen and that works just about as well.

So is the algorithm a thing? Yes, of course. It is recognizable. You read some unknown code and all of a sudden, the algorithm pops out of the confusion of its coding and you see the idea that the writer was attempting to reach. You can then look at the code in a new light and determine if the expression of the idea was accurate and free of mistake.

Is the algorithm a physical thing? Not at all. There can be expressions of the idea which somewhat become physical in marks of ink on paper or in coded holes in paper or even the the arrangement of a linear encoding of magnetic flux, displayed in the pulsing of electrons encountering a glowing phosphor screen.

As was alluded to above, even the representations of the algorithm are somehow at the limits of physicality.

One can even speak of the intelligence of the algorithm or in other words, the appropriateness of the algorithm to the problem domain.

For example, the algorithm depends on the amount of time required to access the array elements being roughly the same. The algorithm could become self-aware if the access to the array elements were abstracted into a function and the execution of the access function timed. If the algorithm were to be enhanced to account for this time, it could notice a violation of the basic constraints if the access times varied by much from the norm. It could even raise an alert and signal alarm at the discrepancy.

Suppose that some bone-headed programmer were to implement the binary search algorithm in layers of abstraction. But instead of representing the data in an array, the dunderhead was to layer the binary search function over a linked-list data representation. Recall that to find an item in a linked list, one must start at the first element and then examine additional elements until either the search key is located or the end of the list is reached. This form of layering obviously violates the equal access provision and would be a "stupid" algorithm. Or a “ugly” composition of otherwise decent ideas.

As a parenthetical note, I take this previous example from an actual discovery in examining some purchased code for which my company had paid something like $50,000 dollars. When I mentioned this to my counterpart, the support engineer of the seller, he acknowledged the error but countered with the observation that the stupidity in the code was not significant as the number of items in the list was never large enough to matter. Needless to say, my expectations regarding the code, the engineer, and the company were reset in a downwards direction.

So in conclusion, an instrumented algorithm with an awareness of time, can be aware of deviations. Deviations can produce an alarm which can be sensed by other parts of the system. This kind of a system is at some level, "self-aware". And it is based on ideas which are non-physical and in some sense eternal or outside of time. Ideas which can be composited or layered.

So the question now is this. Can ideas be composited naturally or do they require a programmer?

To argue the first case is to argue for evolution and the second, for a god.

But in the first case, evolution, you still reach the point of the existence of a programmer.

Which in the limit, becomes a god, provided that communications costs are held sufficiently low and the efforts of all programmers can combine in a non-stupid manner. Probably not with money being the motivating force but rather a love of beauty and elegance at the core of their efforts.