[keymone]

Sure, just like a thermostat doesn’t experience the feeling of temperature, there is no need for human to feel it, so I understand that we need to explain why is it that we still feel the feeling rather than just observe the signal and react.

So why is it wrong to explain this by the necessary recursiveness of predictive modeling that includes modeling “self”? We observe the temperature but we also observe ourselves observing the temperature. First is the signal, second is the introspection of the model evoked by that signal - the feeling.

[unishark]

Yes but where does this observer come from in the first place? Some theories do presume the thermostat experiences the temperature, just in a less-sophisticated form of consciousness. If an "observer" is nothing more than neurons firing in response to stimuli, then it's not fundamentally different from the thermostat.

[felipeko]

Exactly.

It is understandable that having an model of an observer can be useful to a brain.

But how/why does that opens a window to an actual observer, and not just a model, is the question.

And we only know that - an actual observer exists - through first hand experience. It is our most immediate and certain knowledge (Cogito, ergo sum), everything else can be questioned. Yet, there's nothing in physics or computer science that gives a hint to this being the case.

[jlokier]

Ok, so first hand experience tells you an observer exists.

Are you sure that observer has your personality, mind and memories? Are you sure that observer is involved in any way with the world, other than observing it?

Or are those other things just part of the machinery, and quite illusory. For example our perception of time, coherent thought and personality aren't all that consistent, as we know from various experiments and observations.

Here is the crux of my point:

If there's an actual observer, let's call it "primal consciousness", but they are observing the world through the lens of a mind, which is a complex, self-referential, reactive process running on a brain and body, we don't need to say that any particular physical process "creates" consciousness. We can settle with physical processes create something complex and interesting, which runs models of itself and the world, which "primal consciousness" observes. The "mind machine" running on the physics does not contain the observer, it's observed by the observer.

That doesn't "solve" the hard problem, but it's a model with different properties and consequences than some of the other models.

[keymone]

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24336755

[sooheon]

> So why is it wrong to explain this by the necessary recursiveness of predictive modeling that includes modeling “self”?

It's not "wrong", it's just not parsimonious. A system can model itself without being conscious, any time you have state in a program you are doing this.

[keymone]

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24336755

[njarboe]

I like this idea. From my limited reading and understanding, the nervous system/brain and body seems to function as a huge number of feedback loops where the nerves are predicting a response in the body to a nerve firing event, doing the event, and then comparing what happened to the prediction. Moving your hand is a huge number feedback loops. Seems like a similar thing probably happens for abstract things like words. Building up all these sub models to a model of the self seems like a natural progression and could be very evolutionary beneficial, although with drawbacks also (paralyzing self doubt, depression, neuroticism, etc)

[jlokier]

It's only wrong because it's not really an explanation. At best, it's a weak one.

Saying that an active model of self "is" what we experience as the consciousness we experience doesn't tell us why we have that experience.

We can just as easily imagine a complex machine with an active self-model that isn't conscious, as one that is.[1] So an active self-model doesn't tell us about consciousness. This shows them to be different concepts, not different names for the same concept. Which means neither "is" the other, and "is" is not an explanation.

[1] (To be a little more picky, we can't imagine that if we insist they are the same thing, but that leads to circular reasoning here. Our questioner can imagine both, and for an explanation to explain it needs to address the question, not wave it away by offering something circular.)

It all sort of falls apart when we only talk about whether an object other than ourselves is conscious or not.

As far as we know[2], we can't distinguish consciousness of other objects by observation. A hypothetical non-conscious machine might tell us it is conscious; we will never know if it's GPT-3000 talking or if it's another being like ourselves. So eventually we'll probably decide that it's moot, and treat it as conscious if it behaves convincingly and consistently like it is.

[2] That could change, it's not ruled out.

But that doesn't deal with the "hard problem" of consciousness, which is ourselves.

For ourselves, we are in no doubt about the direct experience of our own consciousness. We might convince ourselves that it's just an active self-model, processing, because of how we think of data processing machines these days. But we shouldn't, for one because that's a weak explanation that doesn't explain, and for two because there are other active self-models in the universe, and also in the much larger abstract realm of "unexecuted" self-models that could exist (pick an RNG seed and set of rules of your choice). We don't experience those, so the one(s) we do experience are notably distinct, for no obvious reason.

[keymone]

lots of interesting replies, thanks. i'll aggregate my thoughts into single comment to keep this discussion more focused.

it seems to me the only rebuttal is "sure, self-models can exist but it's concievable that they can exist without an observer, so why is there an observer?" and to me it sounds similar to "sure, an eye can exist without abiogenesis, so why do we only find it in organisms that resulted from abiogenesis?"

an eye is just a collection of amino-acids, nothing prevents an eye from spontaneously assembling in a primordial soup and we recognize that's absolutely impossible. however i would posit that due to configuration of physical interactions in our universe, it's virtually guaranteed for an eye to develop in any life-form that is exposed to star's radiation in earth-like conditions.

similarly, just that we can think of p-zombie doesn't mean it's a simpler system to natually occure. we don't have understanding of building blocks of consciousness like we do with chemistry and biology but the answer to the why question seems to be quite simple: we observe ourselves because we evolved to. and we can find more and more primitive examples of self-observation in more and more primitive animals, so it's not some binary phenomena.

[vekker]

Commenting a bit late since I had this tab open for a while, but I find this discussion interesting. Even more magical than consciousness itself, are people denying that there even is a hard problem of consciousness to begin with (if you assume the standard model) ;) You started with asking if consciousness is really that magical and finished with basically admitting that we don't have an answer for how it works yet.

The hard problem of consciousness is not just about the why, it's also about the how. That's exactly the magical part: how subjective, non-physical experiences (supposedly) come from physical interactions. Brushing it off as "evolution" is not sufficient to explain the how.

[keymone]

You’re right, I have no idea how and that’s hard to figure out. Probably I misunderstood the statement of the problem by only focusing on the why part.

Coming from engineering background, I would say we need to be looking for self perpatuating loops of neuronal activity (“strange loops” may be quite appropriate concept), but how would we go about looking for them - I have no idea because I’m not up to date on modern brain scanning tech.

[GoblinSlayer]

Why hard problem is even here? Consciousness isn't magic, because chinese room in conscious, and it has nothing to do with quantum mechanics, because of paradoxes.

[jlokier]

That still doesn't explain why I'm conscious, something that I have direct, first-hand experience of.

> Consciousness isn't magic, because chinese room in conscious

That doesn't explain anything.

Does that explain to the person experiencing consciousness why they are? No it doesn't.

It just says "something else is conscious so you are too". Which is not an explanation, it's circular.

Is it relevant if the Chinese room is conscious as well? Not really.

I am curious, though. Do you consider a system (such as a Chinese room) to be conscious if it's only implicit, by writing down the rules it should run, without actually performing any of the rules? What if it's so implicit that we don't even write down anything, we just refer to it by name, and assume we would create the rules if we needed to as the first steps in execution? Is it conscious when nothing happens at all, but it could happen? If yes, does that mean every possible thing that could occur is conscious even if it doesn't occur? Every physical possibility is conscious? The whole world of abstract mathematics is conscious? If the answer to any of those is no, where do you draw the line between conscious things (Chinese room) and not-conscious things?

[GoblinSlayer]

Hard problem suggests that consciousness is magical, in which case it could mess with physics. But if consciousness isn't magic, then hard problem is a problem of understanding, not a problem of physics.

>without actually performing any of the rules?

Chinese room works like human mind, so it should run to be conscious.