[sayonaraman]

I think "consciousness" is such a fuzzy term that talking about is at best premature when we are still trying to understand more fundamental things which underlie cognition, such as how human (or mice) memory works, or how the "cognitive maps" which drive spatial navigation generalize to navigation in abstract "concept spaces", how these "concepts" are represented, or how networks of neurons communicate and synchronize for particular tasks, or just figuring out what exactly are those "tasks", the basic computational primitives of adaptation in "lower" animals and insects, let alone humans.

While scientific reductionism has its limitations (e.g. trying to fully describe the complexity of a single neuron in c.elegans is sort of a rabbit hole) you still have to understand at least some of the basic mechanisms, the "LEGO blocks" of cognition, before talking about such higher level of abstraction, especially when it's so ill-defined.

I think Feynman' definition of "cargo cult science" is appropriate here, where we are trying to explain our perception of reality via superficial "neural correlates", or attaching to it these arbitrary "complexity theories", etc., without understanding the fundamental driving factors, mechanics and constraints of perception, the "why" and "how" first.

[kovek]

Qualia is the ability to experience for example the color red. Or the color blue. An exercise… The universe is interesting, it contains some fields, some particles, some quarks, protons, electrons, photons. Some places don’t have light and others do have light. The universe is even more interesting by the fact that it also contains experience. For some reason we see colors. It is absolutely true. Another thing that we experience is thoughts. They are all different allocations/structures of attention, but they are undeniable parts of the universe.

[jahnu]

To be a bit more precise, qualia are not the ability but they are the actual experiential event. The sensation, the conscious experience of seeing red.

What qualia are made up of are not easy to be accurate about. My favourite thought experiment that interrogates this question is,

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_argument

[TheOtherHobbes]

That's a transparently poor argument because it assumes that Mary's knowledge is complete.

Of course it isn't. We have a very poor understanding of brain states. So all we can say is that Mary will learn something new today. But it's not reasonable to extend this to an assumption that a physicalist explanation of qualia is impossible in principle and will become available in the future.

As it happens I'm not a physicalist, and I suspect - but can't prove - that physicalism won't solve this problem.

But I also don't like poor arguments, and I think the Knowledge Argument is not a good one.

The problem is more fundamental. Qualia are definitively subjective and the only way to prove that physicalism explains them is to somehow make them objective - with some kind of qualia-ometer. Or consciousness-ometer. Or something similar.

That doesn't mean finding correlates - neural states, chemical processes, quantum uncertainty, whatever. It means being able to measure experience itself.

Without that you can build simulacra that show all the correlates, and possibly behave as if they're conscious.

But all you've done is built a robot. You can't prove it actually has experience - including self-awareness - unless you can measure experience with objective instrumentation.

This is a nice paradox, because it requires science to measure subjectivity itself.

It may or may not be possible. But clearly it's not possible now, and is unlikely to become possible any time soon.

[SuoDuanDao]

I wonder, might the fact that 'observation' has measurable effects, e.g. in the double-slit experiment, be a vector for inquiry into the question of qualia? I don't need to observe the path of a photon in the DSE to know whether someone else has observed it if I can see the presence or absence of an interference pattern. If we get better at formalising what 'observation' means in that context, do you think it could be used to arrive at a measure of subjectivity?

[sidlls]

"But all you've done is built a robot. You can't prove it actually has experience - including self-awareness - unless you can measure experience with objective instrumentation."

We build things all the time based on the models of the universe we've got. Your argument strikes me as more or less saying, "sure, we built that jet engine, but unless we can measure what 'being a jet engine' is we've just not really built the complete, real thing."

If we build a thing that appears to have "experiences" indistinguishably from how humans appear to, then that is it. That is, the notion of "experience," as you describe it, is more or less meaningless in the context of the very physical world we occupy.

[TedDoesntTalk]

What is thought? What is a thought?

[civilized]

I send "AI" to the spam folder in general. No one who is actually doing AI calls it AI. It's only called AI in glossy consultant brochures with stock images of a man in a business suit surfing through a tunnel of glowing blue numbers.

[telmo]

Everyone calls it AI. It just so happens that it became a large field, so people tend to say that they work in Machine Learning, or Reinforcement Learning, or Evolutionary Computation. The same as in any other field really.

Also: https://www.journals.elsevier.com/artificial-intelligence

[cscurmudgeon]

https://aaai.org

https://www.ijcai.org

It is used by researchers.

[civilized]

The exceptions that prove the rule. These are the most consultant-surfing-glowing-blue-number-flavored conferences.

[systemsignal]

OpenAI?

[inter_netuser]

Not researchers, according to the peanut gallery.

I’m quite certain Demis Hassabis uses the term regularly, Nature should unpublish him.

[namero999]

Yes, it's fuzzy just because there doesn't seem to be a general widespread agreement on terminology, even among "experts", so that someone uses the word consciousness meaning something completely different than someone else. It seems that each time one wants to embark in a consciousness discussion, there should be a glossary preamble to specify definitions.

Regardless of the breadth of the spectrum of definitions, at the very bottom you find phenomenal consciousness. The given, undeniable fact that "it feels like something". We don't have a plausible avenue, not even in principle, to even start addressing this fact of existence, to the point that the most rational stance is to assume that it is fundamental in nature.

[chmsky00]

You ignore all the dumb ideas that came before Feynman. Falsify a theory specifically. Hand waving it away with gatekeeping weak.

IMO Biology explains consciousness fine. Reinforcement of sensory data given repeat exposure leaves agency memory.

I think “higher abstraction” is such a flimsy term as to be meaningless.

Nothing is more or less abstract. It’s just the abstract it needs to be to “exist”. Humans are the abstract they need to be to exist on Earth.

This idea there’s layers of abstraction and meaning beyond what we can know literally is just a neural implant from years of having tribal elders dictating we fetishize a small set of bad ideas ad naseum, we conjure alternatives in order to escape.

[goatlover]

How about consciousness is color, sound, taste, smell, tactile and other bodily sensations in perception, dreams, memories, imagination, hallucinations and other mental states. Pain isn’t a fuzzy concept. You are well acquainted with what pain feels like for you.

[r3trohack3r]

I’m not sure it’s fuzzy. Hard to describe with words, sure, but not fuzzy. I have a high degree of certainty when someone else is talking about their own consciousness and when they’re not.

For example, when an optometrist or neurologist talks about “sight” they’re talking about the biochemical mechanisms that allow us to see. When I read Plato say “I see therefor I am” it was clear to me he was describing the metaphysical act of personal perception. He was describing the “observer” that was present in the moment, perceiving the biochemical process, not sight itself.

Consciousness is something you likely have. But we (humans) don’t know what it is. To my knowledge, we don’t even know where to start looking for it. Consciousness belongs to the mystics today, by default, because science can not claim it. There isn’t something we can hold and point to saying “this, this is what the mystics call a soul.”

[MaxBarraclough]

> Consciousness belongs to the mystics today, by default, because science can not claim it.

Science doesn't yet have an answer, but that doesn't grant the mystics any credibility. There is no 'by default' when we don't know. I'm reminded of a Dawkins quote:

Lecturer: Scientists answer questions of 'how'. If your question is 'why', I refer you to the theologians.

Dawkins: Why the theologians? Why not the gardeners?

(Trivia: If I recall correctly, Dawkins didn't actually give this response, he thought it up far too late.)

> There isn’t something we can hold and point to saying “this, this is what the mystics call a soul.”

That isn't a game-over, though.

The same goes for information processing, but we're fairly confident in what we call a 'computer'.

You can't hold a center-of-gravity, but we're able to reason about those pretty clearly.

[r3trohack3r]

I think you misunderstood me. In the vacuum of science providing an answer, someone will.

> Dawkins: Why the theologians? Why not the gardeners?

I’ve never heard this. My initial reaction is that “god” exists in the unknown. Asking “why go to the mystics for mystical stuff” is a tautology. If you go to the gardener with a question unanswered by science, and they have an answer, they’re a mystic (or have made a scientific breakthrough).

> You can't hold a center-of-gravity, but we're able to reason about those pretty clearly.

Consciousness is not understood. Full stop. We don’t know what manifests it. We don’t know where it comes from. We don’t know where it goes.

We’ve scratched the surface of the biological mechanisms that give rise to the phenomenon we experience. If you look at me and see a biological computer, I think your statement holds. But when I look at me, in a mirror, I see a biological vessel I occupy; and I don’t know what “I” is.

Trying to oversell our understanding of the universe and our place in it does a disservice to science and the work left to be done.

[oceanplexian]

I agree with this. There are so many philosophical debates out there regarding what happens after we die, if animals are "conscious", if computers or AI could have "consciousness", but in my opinion it's all a big illusion created out of our own egos as a rationalization for our existence.

We are biological machines. Sure, we have an awareness of ourselves, but so do computers in some contexts; for example you could argue a certain types of self-modifying or monitoring code has an awareness of itself. It's already been proven that animals have an awareness of themselves when looking in a mirror, such as Dolphins, Chimpanzees, etc. Humans may be a bit further along in our cognitive development but there is no obvious point where you can say "Humans are conscious" because we're all somewhere on a sliding scale of intelligence and self-awareness.

[throwdecro]

> you could argue a certain types of self-modifying or monitoring code has an awareness of itself.

Having a representation of itself doesn't mean it has an awareness of itself.

[mach1ne]

Isn't that precisely what it means? You are aware of something, thus you can take it and its aspects into consideration in your calculations. You have a representation of yourself - same thing. Of course your representation may not be completely accurate, but what perception would be.

[curryst]

I don't think so. The concept of self is distinct from an image (or other representation). If I run pylint against the pylint source code, it has a representation of itself. It's not aware that those lines of code are in any way special to it. I don't think it mystically becomes self-aware because of that situation.

In your lingo, something can know what it looks like without taking its aspects into consideration.

I think the inverse is true, though: something that cannot perceive a representation of itself cannot be self-aware.

[andybak]

> Isn't that precisely what it means?

Maybe or maybe not. This is the nub of the debate. I would argue that answering "yes" to this is a partial endorsement of pan-psychism. If the ability to experience qualia is property of certain algorithms or types of information flow then it's a fundemental property of the universe.

Thought experiments about p-zombies and mind simulation are an interesting litmus test to separate different points of view on this.

[jcims]

Vegans entered the chat

(sorry) This would mean, at a minimum, that every biological entity down to single cell organisms are conscious. They could be, I don't know.

[kitd]

You say that as an outsider able to view both code and its representation. The code itself only 'sees' its representation as itself.

[systemsignal]

There is actual an obvious point…

Everytime you wake up in the morning.

Some work detecting it as well for medical reasons https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/scitranslmed.3006294

[simonh]

Science is about finding the answers to questions, and philosophy is about working out what the right questions are, which can be surprisingly tricky. The two progress hand in hand. Philosophy isn't just 'bad science'.

[simorley]

No. Science is about empiricism - scientific method, experiments, etc. Philosophy is an overarching field encompassing all pursuit/love of knowledge. It's why another term for science is natural philosophy. It's why people who attain the highest level of education get a doctorate of philosophy ( PhD ).

[WithinReason]

My favorite description of consciousness is from Max Tegmark:

“I think that consciousness is the way information feels when being processed in certain complex ways.”

[namero999]

It strikes me as inconsequential since it presupposes that which is trying to characterize: feeling.

[colechristensen]

Feynman was perhaps a little bit too skeptical of some things.

Everything at one time escaped basic explanation from parts (and there always will be, you can't really explain why the standard model, or whatever more fundamental system which might surpass it)

Consciousness is on the edge of being understood quite a lot better as neurobiology is progressing quite quickly.

[willis936]

All that it reveals is that our suspicions of ontological nihilism were likely correct all along. The universe does not give you purpose or reason. You make your own.

[yazanobeidi]

That is not completely correct. We have inherent biological drives from lower level temperature regulation and such to nutrition intake and on an even higher level a proclivity for social interaction including reproduction. The ways these frames can be aligned and satisfied are not infinite. So some level of constraints and requirements are pre-specified. A person’s chosen behaviour must fit within this structure and that of others for it to be sustainable.

[inter_netuser]

In your view, is information a fundamental or emergent phenomena in physics?