[hackinthebochs]

I feel you have it backwards. That there are observers doesn't seem like much of a mystery: there doesn't seem to be anything mysterious about observers beyond the right kind of computation. The mystery is the qualitative experience of conscious observers, the feel, the what it is like to be, etc.

[monktastic1]

But what could it mean to be an "observer" other than to have said "qualitative experience?"

[thriftwy]

To me it does. What is an observer? Is it distinguishable from its memory? If not, what do you have to do to a memory to add observer to it?

Can we make a conscious machine? Why not? Maybe we can by simulating a brain exactly. But can we then figure out what in our model makes the sim-brain conscious? Can we turn it on and off?

Most of our insights into how human mind works actually describe how a philosophic zombie will work. But I am not one and I would like to know what am I.

[hackinthebochs]

>What is an observer?

There are two issues when it comes to consciousness: the experience and the experiencer. If we conceive of these two concepts as ultimately one in the same problem, then there is no issue with focusing on kinds of processing rather than observers as its ultimately addressing the same issue from a different angle.

If you conceive of these two concepts as separate issues, then your target should be the experience rather than the experiencer. If you consider all the features that make up an experiencer (sans qualitative experience), then these features can be cashed out in terms of information processing. The mystery isn't here, but in the qualitative experience.

>Most of our insights into how human mind works actually describe how a philosophic zombie will work.

Only as far as our descriptions of a brain are "local" in the sense that they don't consider global properties of such an information processing system. That is, we can have a description of a system that makes accurate predictions without making any high level statements about its processing. We can conceivably describe the workings of a biological creature without ever (explicitly) mentioning molecules, proteins, cells, DNA, action potentials, etc. Yet if we concluded from this that biological zombies were conceivable (physical systems that behaved exactly like biological organisms just without cells, proteins, etc), we'd be mistaken. But this is the same kind of leap that we make when take the p-zombie argument seriously.

[deburo]

I may be misunderstanding your claim, but otherwise I think the article would actually interest you. Here's a quote from the paper:

"Instead of starting with the hard problem of why an arrangement of particles can feel conscious, we will start with the hard fact that some arrangement of particles (such as your brain) do feel conscious while others (such as your pillow) do not, and ask what properties of the particle arrangement make the difference."

Is that not investigating what makes something conscious (i.e. an observer)?

EDIT: after a bit of reading, this is not intended for non-scientists. The introduction is interesting, but otherwise your time might be better spent reading critiques of this paper instead if you're a newbee like I am. Here's one such critique: http://blog.jessriedel.com/2014/05/13/comments-on-tegmarks-c...

[curo]

> "beyond the right kind of computation"

Could you explain this?

The observer isn't a mystery, I agree. But the original comment seems spot on: if you are describing consciousness as a state of matter, then you're saying something like, "matter inherits a different set of qualities when it's in a consciousness state (as opposed to a solid or liquid state)." If the state change leads to a change of quality, then you're once again proclaiming consciousness as an object with observable qualities rather than a the observer without quality. This is fine if we're talking about an observable consciousness, but then who is that observer?

I agree with the original comment that this paper is nonsense. I'm surprised how many papers are spent discussing consciousness this way. In biological terms, fine. In physical terms, impossible.

[hackinthebochs]

>Could you explain this?

I'm not intending to say anything particularly deep. If we could exhaustively list the features of a "conscious observer", every feature except for qualia (the qualitative experience) could be cashed out as some kind of information processing (e.g. knowledge of one's own mental states). And so when it comes to explaining consciousness, the difficulty isn't the observer part, but the qualitative experience part.

>In biological terms, fine. In physical terms, impossible.

But if biology is just physics, then it should be possible in principle. We should encourage people to bring their particular expertise to the problem instead of taking our own conceptions so seriously to the point of actively discouraging ideas that don't fit. I'm happy Tegmark seems immune to charges of being a crackpot.

[crawfordcomeaux]

Nobody acting in good faith is smart enough to be 100% wrong.

[robertothais]

If consciousness is a physical thing, how can you be so convinced that it is impossible to talk about it in physical terms? Couldn't the difficulty be due to a deficiency in our current explanatory power, as opposed to something more fundamental? What evidence do you have to support that biological talk (about consciousness, or otherwise) is necessarily irreducible to physical talk?

These questions are very interesting and very hard, and dismissing honest attempts to grapple with them rigorously, wrong as they may turn out to be, seems rash to me.