[BasedAnon]

What's the deal with these things being lumped in with physics? This isn't physics this is just regular philosophy with some scientific sounding language. I feel like this is people reaching for religion but not wanting to admit it to themselves.

[jemmyw]

It's a shame to see so many comments engaged in this kind of pseudoscience. There's no evidence that consciousness is anything other than a state arising from the physical processes in our bodies. I'm open minded to hypothesis that are potentially testable, but people keep just repeating the implausible.

I also hate that I keep reading that consciousness, or anything else, is a universe "hack" which is several levels of stupid. From the language level, you cannot apply that word to a non engineered system with no purpose because it implies subverting the purpose.

[kklisura]

> It's a shame to see so many comments engaged in this kind of pseudoscience.

You have Roger Penrose [1] interested in link to say between consciousness and physics [2]. Would you consider that to be pseudoscience?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Penrose

[2] https://nautil.us/roger-penrose-on-why-consciousness-does-no...

[tsimionescu]

Yes, Roger Penrose, despite his extraordinary career and contributions to science, has more recently been engaging more in this type of pseudoscience.

It can and has happened to other extraordinary minds as well - Linus Pauling, one of the forefathers of quantum chemistry and molecular biology, but also a promoter of vitamin C as a panacea in his later years.

[cscurmudgeon]

> pseudoscience

Repeatedly calling something pseudoscience doesn't make it so.

[gaganyaan]

You're rather missing their point. Great minds have fallen for pseudoscience. Why should we think Penrose is any different?

[tsimionescu]

GP asked whether we are calling what Roger Penrose is doing pseudoscience, and I responded that we do.

Now, why is it pseudoscience?

Because the parts of the theory due to Penrose are essentially philosophical, he doesn't really make any firm claims beyond "quantum effects - particularly superposition - are involved in human decision-making". The parts that Hameroff brings to the table are specific, but fanciful. The whole "microtubules observe quantum effects" is about as plausible as cold fusion - it is motivated thinking that contradicts some basic limits that we have observed, and relies on some gaps in our physical knowledge to not quite be provably wrong.

Overall they are combining musings about the universe with bits of biology and QM that are not yet fully understood into a theory that uses the trappings of science, but relies on motivated thinking to have any plausibility. It's most similar to the homeopathic quacks' claims about the memory of water: not fully proven to be impossible, but moatly on account of the vagueness of the claims. So, what they are doing fits the definition of pseudoscience.

[mikhailfranco]

Penrose and Hameroff's theory about microtubules is certainly science not pseudoscience. It is a specific theory with falsifiable predictions.

In the absence of a definition of consciousness, perhaps the only validation would be evidence that general anaesthetics take effect in the microtubules (Hameroff is an anaesthesiologist).

It might not be possible to show that macroscopic quantum effects are required, or that consciousness is more powerful than an algorithmic computer (Turing Machine) - two of Penrose's related speculations.

Another of Penrose's claims is that gravitational divergences collapse the quantum wavefunction. This is logically separate from, but is often linked with, the conscious perception issue, as presented in their Orchestrated Objective Reduction theory (ORR):

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

The latter gravitational claim is being tested independently from brains, using conventional QM experiments in the presence of large masses. The precision to resolve the question is within reach.

Definitely science.

[mikhailfranco]

Right on cue, here is an "Into The Impossible" podcast interview from Brian Keating:

Stuart Hameroff: Is the Brain a Quantum Computer

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q6gpp70yvgo

[jemmyw]

I have watched and read his opinions and yes, he has, in my opinion, veered into pseudoscience. It's not exactly without precedence for an established and respected scientist to go all philosophical with age.

I would put his current position somewhere like "I really want free will to be true therefore..." rather than an observational approach.

[VirusNewbie]

Penrose, like it or not, has developed a fairly rigorous, if not flawed hypothesis that is quite a stark contrast between many philosophers who espouse such ideas as pan psychism.

[FrustratedMonky]

I think that there is such a groundswell of articles about 'consciousness', right now, is because of the surge in AI and GPT.

If this is true. >"state arising from the physical processes"

Then nothing prevents silicon from eventually also being 'conscious'.

Carbon or Silicon, they are both a physical processes. Electrical potentials.

So the section of population that just can't abide that AI could be 'conscious' are finding all these more esoteric arguments about the universe being 'consciousness', quantum something or other, etc... To find 'some spark' in the human, some metaphysical argument, to keep us special.

[nico]

> the section of population that just can't abide that AI could be 'conscious' are finding all these more esoteric arguments about the universe being 'consciousness'

Panpsychism asserts that everything is conscious, which means that AI or silicon would already be conscious, which basically means there is no special human spark

If anything, if you are trying to prove that AI is not conscious, you would be absolutely rejecting panpsychism or anything that remotely resembles it

[orwin]

Agree. I'll also say it's a lot further away than your comment implies. Once ChatGPT4 can add metonymy by itself in a random discussion, talking about consciousness in silicon can be interesting.

[FrustratedMonky]

GPT4 is just the latest thing.

It was only a few years ago that AlphaGo beat the best human at GO. Supposedly a game so deep that only some unknown quality of being a human could ever grasp it.

And AlphaStar also wins against humans in SC2, where there is hidden information and 'deception'.

I'd say that is more worry than GPT. GPT is a language model.

AlphaGo is winning in a competitive game.

and

Life is just a game.

Just start adding more variables, and more goals. Start combining GPT/AlphaGo/Visions Systems/etc.... It might not be that far.

[jemmyw]

> Then nothing prevents silicon from eventually also being 'conscious'.

I would agree except "nothing we know" because we still don't know how consciousness works.

[amatecha]

Yeah, I’ve believed for most of my life that consciousness is some emergent thing that arises from the interaction of all the complex biological processes of our brain and its sensory input. Most people don’t like to hear this though, and I don’t express the idea often - it’s disappointing to consider this possibility (I consider it certain, as I’ve observed nothing to suggest otherwise).

[matt-attack]

I believe physics can absolutely explain everything about our behavior when viewed externally. Clearly our personalities, emotion and general behavior are the result of incredibly complex systems of molecules and electrical charge in the brain.

What you’re ignoring and what Chalmers and the folks in TFA are talking about is, the explaining the inner view. The subjective experience. In fact the only inner view I’m 100% sure of is my own. I really have no direct evidence that you or any other human is actually having a subjective experience. Nonetheless you cannot deny they it exists and we should try to explain it.

I’m not just a device responding to input. I am that, but I’m more. I have a subjective experience. There are “lights on”.

[MrYellowP]

Imagine there's no internet and you don't have a dictionary.

When you've never observed the Eiffel tower and someone tells you the Eiffel Tower exists, will you tell them that they're wrong?

"There's no evidence that the Eiffel Tower exists."

Do you have any evidence the Eiffel Tower does not exist?

No?

Then it makes no sense to assume you know what's reality. The reason, why you insist that it doesn't exist, is because you're narrow minded and boring. It's not because you know better, because you can't know better.

In regards to the topic of consciousness it is not just insanely ignorant to believe that the lack of evidence is evidence that it is NOT something, it is also incredibly full of yourself to assume you're right simply because of that.

Fact of the matter is that a lack of evidence does not necessarily automatically prove anything. Us not being able to find evidence means exactly nothing, which is proven by human history itself.

For example, if Ignaz Semmelweiß would have had your flawed reasoning, he would have never tried washing his arms and hands.

[plonk]

That's a weak argument. The reason some of us don't believe that consciousness is something else than the state of a brain following physical processes is that the latter is a much simpler theory and matches every objective observation we can make.

If you try to explain consciousness as just the state of a physical brain, all the observations agree with you. The brain is known to be capable of computing. There are known regions inside it that activate when the subject feels certain emotions and thinks a certain kind of thoughts. There are regions that have predictable effects on the person's consciousness when damaged (see lobotomy). _And_ this hypothesis doesn't contradict any observations made until now (which is not the only argument as you're implying, just one of them, and a good one).

If you try to explain consciousness as something else, you have to change the laws of physics. You have to consider that _something_ exists that isn't in the current theories, just to explain a phenomenon that shows no evidence of needing that. There's no data to guess what it is, how it behaves, why it exists, whether it interacts with anything. Actually, you could say that all the evidence until now proves that it doesn't interact with anything in a measurable way, besides brainwaves (which are just regular electrical activity in the nervous system) and whatever the body does (which is explained by nerve signals coming from the brain).

To believe that something exists, you make observations that your current theory can't explain and try to explain them. Here the root observation is that we "feel" conscious, we feel that we are something more than the physical objects that are our bodies. This is an observation about the state of our brains, it's not an observation about the rest of the world. It doesn't need any new laws of physics to be understood and it doesn't give us any data that we could use to build such a law. The only reason you're giving weight to this is that you are wired to see humans as something special. It's a reflection of the way you think. When you correct for that bias, there's nothing left.

It's much like believing that a god exists, built the universe, looks and thinks and feels like a human, and wants us to be good. It's so obviously something that humans naturally want to think because it matches with their inner biases that it's not worth considering as a scientific hypothesis. It's completely explained by the brain being wired to see humans (and living things in general) as something "special" because that helped with natural selection.

[imtringued]

>The only reason you're giving weight to this is that you are wired to see humans as something special. It's a reflection of the way you think. When you correct for that bias, there's nothing left.

Uh, no. The reason why you need a "conscious" universe is precisely beause humans aren't special. In a conscious universe model, the brain "abuses" the laws of physics including whatever laws that relate to consciousness to result in an organism with higher environmental fitness.

I am more than willing to consider a robot or a wet piece of cloth as conscious, but the problem is that you need to somehow unify these incredibly different experiences as conscious.

The people who believe that consciousness is just the result of processes in the brain also believe that a computer can become conscious given the right program, but this is nonsense, because the computer hardware already has all of the hardware to perform lesser forms of consciousness. The "thoughts" of a processor don't have to be in the form of human intelligence that can be easily observed. The idea that consciousness suddenly turns on because you load a carefully crafted file from your SSD into RAM and turns off if you zero it out, is what is ridiculous to me and that is exactly what "the brain gives rise to consciousness" says to me. After all, if you could somehow simulate the brain of a crow or any other animal, you would not be able to understand what the animal is saying and discount it's consciousness the same way we discount the consciousness of farm animals. So for me, your explanation is the one that makes humans special.

[plonk]

> Uh, no. The reason why you need a "conscious" universe is precisely beause humans aren't special. In a conscious universe model, the brain "abuses" the laws of physics including whatever laws that relate to consciousness to result in an organism with higher environmental fitness.

> I am more than willing to consider a robot or a wet piece of cloth as conscious, but the problem is that you need to somehow unify these incredibly different experiences as conscious.

I have no idea what you mean. What does it mean to "abuse" the laws of physics? Why would you need to do that to improve an organism's environmental fitness, compared to simply developing a complex nervous system by natural selection? Do you consider these to be the same thing? Where does the "conscious universe" come up in that process?

> The people who believe that consciousness is just the result of processes in the brain also believe that a computer can become conscious given the right program, but this is nonsense, because the computer hardware already has all of the hardware to perform lesser forms of consciousness.

That sentence doesn't make sense to me either. How does the second proposition contradict the first?

"Consciousness" isn't a clearly defined line, it's a pattern of thoughts that happen in a system complex enough to be aware of itself and its surroundings. I'm conscious because my thoughts include the fact that I exist and that I am thinking, and that fact influences my thoughts. A regular computer isn't there because it follows a program without knowing that it's doing it, or having any kinds of thoughts about itself. When we program a computer to do that (and current computers are probably physically capable of some form of that, as you say), then they will fit the definition of consciousness.

> After all, if you could somehow simulate the brain of a crow or any other animal, you would not be able to understand what the animal is saying and discount it's consciousness the same way we discount the consciousness of farm animals.

Why would I want to discount the consciousness of a crow? What does the fact that some people discount the consciousness of farm animals have to do with this discussion? I really don't understand what point you're making. It seems that you're trying to put words in my mouth, creating a contradiction with things I didn't say.

Crows are probably conscious, farm animals are probably conscious, and a wet piece of cloth or a plant aren't. That's because the cloth and the plant don't have a nervous system capable of holding the thought that it itself exists. I'm open to changing my mind about plants if we discover one that does.

> So for me, your explanation is the one that makes humans special.

Defining a concept necessarily makes some things special in the context of that definition. That's what a definition does. Consciousness has a somewhat vague definition that clearly applies to humans and some mammals, while it doesn't apply to rocks and plants. Your objection is like saying that a rock is "alive" because otherwise the definition of "life" would make humans special. Of course it does! It makes every living thing "special" in that it fits the definition, while other things don't. Again, that's the whole point of defining a concept: discriminating the objects that display it from the objects that don't.

[hnfong]

> The reason some of us don't believe that consciousness is something else than the state of a brain following physical processes is that the latter is a much simpler theory and matches every objective observation we can make.

I have personally seen and experienced things that cannot be explained by these physical theories, and while you may want to just throw those observations as delusions or fraud, consider how the standard process of deciding what counts as “scientific evidence” is biased towards those that are consistent with the status quo.

You actually don’t need to look too far to find things that don’t quite sit well with the established theories. Those that are not obviously fraud. People then just casually explain them away as coincidence or physiological illusions or the like.

I can totally understand how people can convince themselves that the established theories are sufficient unless and until they experience a dramatic event that throws them off course. That said the rabbit hole is truly deep if you actually spend time searching for info.

I’m just trying to tell you that the quoted sentence is just plainly wrong. I have no obviously better theories however, and to the extent that modern science can convince a large part of the population that the quoted sentence is correct shows how reasonably well the theories of modern science holds up to scrutiny. I just think it’s a disservice to all to brush away the weird bits that don’t fit.

[amatecha]

I'm not quite sure what point you're trying to make here. What is this hypothetical Eiffel tower situation an analogy to? Someone claiming our consciousness is derived from some ephemeral soul or spirit?

I'm not trying to assert or prove the inexistence of something (especially considering https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evidence_of_absence ). My belief is that our consciousness is a physical, organic phenomenon, directly emergent from the "circuitry" of our brain. I don't personally believe there is anything beyond that, unfortunately. Simultaneously, I'm not directly arguing that assertion or trying to "prove" it, because I'm simply stating my subjective opinion, which was clearly communicated in my post, with the wording "I’ve believed for most of my life" and "I consider it". It will never be anything more than a belief, because I will never be able to prove this. My observations and knowledge I've gained through life support my belief quite strongly, while none have ever provided a shred of support for an argument for any sort of "soul" or "spirit". I'm 100% open to the idea, but unfortunately literally all experiences related to life, consciousness and existence in my nearly 40 years alive have correlated with my "I am nothing more than my body" opinion.

[lend000]

Why is it pseudoscience to label the medium by which particles are entangled as consciousness? We have no better definition than that, since the observers of any delayed choice quantum eraser experiment are ultimately conscious, and we have no means of recording similar results without a conscious observer.

I used to think I was very clever for independently coming to effectively the same conclusion as Schmidhuber, that consciousness is a byproduct of data compression in the brain, and a brain needs to tell itself it has subjective qualia to do all the complex things we can do. And while that might be theoretically sound, I think it leaves high dose psychedelic experiences woefully unexplained, which I think really transcend any evolutionary or biological reason for happening and have incredible parallels across people and cultures (the consistency of seeing "machine elves" while on DMT, for example). Ultimately, an infinite consciousness experiencing infinite reality seems so much more elegant as a base level of existence than the Standard Model being the root of all existence. But, to each their own.

[jemmyw]

> Why is it pseudoscience to label the medium by which particles are entangled as consciousness

Because it's untestable nonsense. Just because all consciousness derives from physical processes that include quantum effects doesn't then lead to all consciousness being linked, being one, being infinite. Entanglement is an interaction to interaction thing, it's not a magical side channel for information.

> Ultimately, an infinite consciousness experiencing infinite reality seems so much more elegant as a base level of existence than the Standard Model being the root of all existence

There are many ideas that are more elegant than the Standard Model. One day we might find one that works and fills in some gaps, and that would be great. Coming up with a philosophical idea (consciousness is infinite and connected) with no evidence or any real basis in reality other than it sounds nice and then tying that to an existing scientific idea that sounds vaguely like it could support it (QM has entanglement of particles over distance) but actually wouldn't support the idea anyway is exactly what pseudoscience is.

What I'm saying is: even if there was some kind of consciousness network, the mechanism for that would not be entangled quantum particles.

[mikhailfranco]

> Why is it pseudoscience to label the medium by which particles are entangled as consciousness

Because it's just the identification of mysteries: all mysteries are each other's explanation.

But in this case, there is no evidence of any connection (pace Penrose & Hameroff, not yet).

[cscurmudgeon]

> There's no evidence that consciousness is anything other than a state arising from the physical processes in our bodies.

Just because you didn't don't know about X doesn't mean X doesn't exist. Simple logic that even children learn quickly.

[hnfong]

This is sadly a recurring feature of how modern scientists make excuses. I don’t know how many times I’ve heard this as an excuse from COVID fuckups

The infuriating part is how often the evidence is there, just not in the convenient peer reviewed format that scientists are addicted to these days

[mikhailfranco]

Previous post did not say the unknown X doesn't exist.

They said there is no evidence for X.

Absence of evidence is not (usually) evidence of absence.

Seems like you agree. No children involved.

[mnky9800n]

Recognizing emergent behaviour has led to a lot of deeper understanding of the universe. Why should this be any different?

I'm not saying there's some consciousness field that my mind is a perturbation of. But it is interesting that we all have more or less the same experience of existing even though we are simply a collection of atoms in a local low entropy state.

[eureka-belief]

You say you’re open to any testable hypothesis. But I’d argue that there is just as little evidence that consciousness arises from biological processes as there is that it arises from the universe. And the article talks about that. (Ie the so called “zombie” problem)

You can’t prove that I’m conscious and I can prove that you’re conscious. We only make that assumption.

[jemmyw]

I'm not making that assumption. I'm thinking that either I'm a zombie or you're insane.

[orwin]

I think consciousness emerge from physical processes. Imho consciousness is necessary to have a sense of self, and especially of self through time. This imply any living being capable of improvising new strategies (not randomly through chance and genetic lottery) is 'conscious' in the same sense that we are.

[nico]

Not rejecting your comment. Just a note that consciousness does not need a sense of self

You can absolutely be conscious without having a sense of self

[nico]

There are many ways to have a non-self or non-dual consciousness experience

Do some research, you can get into meditation or find a safe way to experience with psychedelics

Also, it’s a natural part of our own human experience. Babies are born without a sense of self, which mainly develops over the first few years of existence

[BasedAnon]

>There's no evidence that consciousness is anything other than a state arising from the physical processes in our bodies

Actually this is backward, "I think therefore I am". There's no reason to believe consciousness is a state arising from a physical process, our experience of consciousness precedes our experience of sensory input and therefore the physical world.

There is more evidence for the reality of consciousness than there is for the physical world, in fact we know for a fact that our understanding of the physical world is aberrational.

edit: evidently alot of empiricists aren't very happy with this comment hahaha

[orwin]

No. Or rather what do you mean?

We are able to track down and physically explain (thanks to MRI) the sentation, the objective part of consciousness (Chalmers's 'easy problems of consciousness'). That really exist and we can prove it (or we have an idea about experiments to run to prove it)

I suppose here you're talking about the subjective sentation, the phenomenal experience, the 'hard problem', and you reference the 'cogito' not because you are a dualists, but because you truly think Descartes was right on this point (and this point only, the rest was extremely weak).

I will argue that you're wrong. There is absolutely no evidence to the cogito, at most billions of anecdata from homo sapiens who all have similar brains and reactions!

Some people believe subjective experience do not really exist [0][1]. A simple explanation would be: if we are somehow able to predict, by pure observation of predictable physical reactions, how an organism will act and react, including the fact that he will believe in a subjective experience, then we do not need to think subjective experience really exist. This is merely a tool for our bodies to create a sense of self unique through time, created from our own continuous perceptions, to allow our brains to strategize and avoid dangers.

[0]https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-018-02071-y

[1]https://github.com/keithfrankish/articles/blob/master/Franki...

[BasedAnon]

>We are able to track down and physically explain (thanks to MRI) the sentation, the objective part of consciousness (Chalmers's 'easy problems of consciousness'). That really exist and we can prove it (or we have an idea about experiments to run to prove it)

What we prove is an evidence that is filtered through our sensory faculties and experienced by our minds. Our minds still remain judge, jury and executioner and in this same sense if we are to take seriously the faculties of our minds in assessing the physical world, then we must also take seriously our experience of conciousness which remains even when we are unable to sense the physical world. In this sense our experience of conciousness is more real than our looking at an MRI.

>then we do not need to think subjective experience really exist.

What would follow is that you do not need to think subjective experiences exist for others, but for you to make this assessment you at least must have a subjective experience.

[gaganyaan]

I don't really buy your argument about what's more real. If I was watching TV and a character punched the screen and I got a bloody nose from it, that's pretty real.

Similarly, if my mind experiences my body reaching out to take a drug and then my conciousness fractures, I think that's a sign that the experience is pretty damn real, regardless of whatever fragile concept of "consciousness" is floating in that reality.

If "you" are unable to sense the real world because you're unconscious, that doesn't mean your body isn't cogitating, it just means that the individual parts haven't come together to construct the illusion that is "you". Parts of your nervous system continue to work, though.

[orwin]

That's the beauty of illusionism, isn't it? You really have to think against yourself. If you can explain a person's reaction without 'knowing' his subjective experience, you do not need 'hard' consciousness to explain your reactions either. So you, right now, digesting this sentence and experiencing subjective thoughts, do not really experience those, you just have the illusion you do. Look at my second link.

[jemmyw]

There are plenty of reasons to believe it's physical. I mean, in some ways I can't believe I'm having to write "there are no ghosts" to a technically minded community.

If consciousness was not physical then where is it? Why would it switch on and off with physical changes to brains? Why would you be able to get altered states of consciousness with chemicals, disease and age? Why would be be able to marry some conscious activity with MRI scans?

There's quite a few bits of evidence to suggest it's physical even if we don't know how it works. There doesn't appear to be any evidence of another... what is a non physical process anyway? Surely there's only two options: the physics we know and the physics we don't know?

[amatecha]

Yeah I’m not sure why someone would argue that consciousness isn’t physical. Take a conscious person and knock them hard in the head. Interesting, their consciousness is altered. Take drugs? Check it out, consciousness altered. People who experience head trauma have their personality permanently altered. In the course of life you will likely directly observe the effects of physical injury on a person’s consciousness, just due to how often that kind of stuff happens.

[jemmyw]

> Yeah I’m not sure why someone would argue that consciousness isn’t physical

Reading the comments, one thing that's been unsaid is whether each person discussing is religious/spiritual or not. My guess is that if you are religious then the idea of there being another layer in the universe goes without saying, and if you are not then it's ridiculous.

It's probably a waste of time debating across that line.

[imtringued]

For me it has very little to do with religiousness but rather calming down some rather frequent panic attacks in the middle of the night. The fact that thinking the wrong thing can erase your consciousness while thinking it, doesn't help from the group that believes thinking the wrong thing erases consciousness.

[imtringued]

The difference is people like you mean consciousness = "consciousness as the average human experiences it", whereas others include every single potential conscious experience, including the delibitated one. From your perspective, a knocked out human isn't conscious the same way a corpse is not conscious, because he does not conform to the average human experience.

Meanwhile others think that the knocked out human and the corpse and the average human are all conscious, but they experience their respective consciousnessess aka the consciousness of an average human, knocked out human or corpse. You could say that this is just a disagreement in what the word conscious means.

[suggestion]

>Why would be be able to marry some conscious activity with MRI scans?

Does the activity cause the changes on the scan or does the changes in the scan cause the activity? How does neuroplasticity result in physical changes to the brain through, for example, cognitive behavioral therapy? Do the thoughts alter the physical structure or does the structure cause the thoughts even before the structural changes?

[jemmyw]

Internal feedback loops. Activity from the existing structure further modifies that structure. That activity is that thoughts are. So sure but it's all physical.

[suggestion]

That doesn't make any sense. If that's the case, the physical change should precede the changes in thought patterns.

Also, physicalism is about as empirical as falling in love. It's far from definitive, proven, fact.

There's no chemical emission that can force someone to have an exact thought, dream, or inner dialogue.

[akomtu]

The idea that consciousness is physical doesn't mean it's mechanical. Physical world is made of fields with no clear boundaries, while mechanical system are made of isolated deterministic and immutable parts.

[BasedAnon]

The difference is that you do not experience ghosts, but you do experience conciousness.

>If consciousness was not physical then where is it?

We can invert this and ask, if physicality is not ideal, then how do we come to know it?

>Surely there's only two options: the physics we know and the physics we don't know?

The third option is that physics is unable to interrogate itself.

[jemmyw]

> We can invert this and ask, if physicality is not ideal, then how do we come to know it?

Why would we ask that? Not ideal for what? It just is.

> The third option is that physics is unable to interrogate itself.

This is likely true. We are the product of physics and we can only delve so deep. It might be that we cannot see to the most fundamental level(s). That's not a third option though, that's just the state of any scientific investigation at any point of time. However, given all we have learnt so far, what we don't need to do is invent new gods for the levels we cannot see or the things we cannot yet understand. I mean, people will, evidently, but that's all just wishful thinking.

Meanwhile there is slow progress to piece together how the brain works. My opinion is that we will figure it out but the answers about consciousness will be unsatisfactory. Just like right now, given the current understanding of physical processes even taking into account quantum systems having probabilistic outcomes, we have no free will. It's an answer, I find it a compelling one, but most folks don't like that answer.

[tsimionescu]

> Why would we ask that? Not ideal for what? It just is.

I'm pretty sure GP was using "ideal" in the sense of "made up of ideas", as in the philosophical concept of idealism, which is essentially the opposite of materialism: idealism is the position that the real world is that of the mind, and physics and the physical world is an emergent property of our minds, not the other way around.

Not that I think this is a real coherent position worth discussing.

[aiProgMach]

Thank you. It's really mind boggling how many people miss _this_ especially in scientism echo chambers. My knowledge about myself (consciousness, free will...), is infinitely more reliable than any of "Scientific" input no matter what is the "impact factor" of the publishing medium, so really no amount of "science" can be enough to disprove those very basic principles that everything else is built upon them.

[mikhailfranco]

I think individual self-knowledge is often flawed. There are many strange, damaged, malfunctioning, drunk, medicated, hallucinating, meditating, dreaming and variously other disturbed minds, which have objectively flawed impressions of themselves and their surroundings.

Their doctors, or even a casual observer, will have much more concrete objective knowledge of their state of mind than the subjects themselves.

[aiProgMach]

What you're saying does not contradict what I'm saying. The thing you're describing works on a much higher level than what I was describing, for example in this case the doctor needs to fulfill at least the following requirements (from his own point of view):

1- He's independent agent who's watching and describing another independent agent in a real objective world

2- He acknowledge that there is cause/effect in principal (that's why they can deduce that there are flaws in the patient mind just based on external behaviour)

3- The doctor is trusting that he's not himself hallucinating, and that he's indeed see'ing real things and he's not just a programmed robot doing some random job.

and so on.

--

As you can see I was talking about very basic level, it's the level that allow you to build another more complex level of information, and which any other information is necessarily less reliable than it. Because trusting that I'm independent agent who exists in an objective world along another independent agents is a necessary Premise to accept any external information provided by those other agents, and any information provided by those agents that contradicts this basic experience it also destroys any reliability in the objectivity and correctness of their existence for me and any input provided by them. Hence, any "scientific" paper that contradicts my direct experience about myself (e.g Free will) is necessarily less reliable than said experience no matter what is the impact factor of the journal.

[mikhailfranco]

Most of what you you say is credible. But it comes down to a personal choice about the balance of probabilities for where objective knowledge really resides.

I do not trust myself, as one flawed, idiosyncratic and individual brain.

I am more likely to trust the established objective view of other consciousnesses. The scientific method is (should be) a collective network of communicating, iterating, self-correcting consciousnesses, which operates according to robust rules and procedures established (evolved) by previous generations of collaborating consciousnesses. Of course, it is also flawed, but over long periods of time, it usually gets better answers than the intuition of individuals.

If I think I can drive, but I am drunk, and a good friend tells me I'm drunk and I should not drive, then I should believe them, not me.

If I think I have some medical symptoms, I tell a doctor. However, an individual doctor can be corrupted by mis-education, ignorance, their own psychological issues, or their own financial gains for various treatments. So I ask multiple doctors, but they may have a consistent bias. But if I don't trust any rational explanation of my symptoms, then yet another doctor may diagnose shape-shifting hypochondria or paranoia against doctors. Who to believe? It's not obvious, but it's not obviously me over all others.

[mikhailfranco]

With regard to Free Will, there is a little intellectual dodge called the Compatibilist solution (popularized by Dennett), which says you really feel like you have free will, but you do not. Also see Sam Harris and Robert Sapolsky on the topic (but note Dennett strongly disagrees with Harris, he has no choice, it could not be otherwise :)

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/compatibilism/

The feeling of Free Will is bootstrapped from making decisions in a complex world. The subconscious makes most decisions automatically, based on left-brain exploitation of the current situation for survival. The timescales are too short for slow consideration to have an evolutionary advantage. Any imprinting of this instant behavior is made by stress hormones, which enhance memory retention for unusual or extreme situations.

However, the right brain is tasked with fitting actions into a wider context of long-term survival. It can run what-if scenarios, imagine different courses of action, and different outcomes. Its view of an action is always in the belief that something could be different next time, so something could be different last time - I could have done something else. But this is false, the left-brain was in control, and the right brain just provides post hoc rationalizations for those forced actions.

So, approximately, Free Will is the story the right brain tells itself after the left-brain already made the decision.

For more on the split brain aspect of this, see McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary and The Matter With Things.

[bigboy12]

200 years ago, we thought the universe was just the Milky Way. You really can’t determine what consciousness is until you know what it is. There’s no evidence that consciousness arises from the physical body at all. If you look at a dead body. The “life” is gone. Who knows where or. what it is, we certainly don’t at this point.

[prng2021]

This is the same kind of thinking that flat earthers have. 200 years ago you should have been ridiculed for claiming that something existed beyond the Milky Way without any evidence.

Why do you say there’s no evidence that consciousness arises from a physical body? If my physical body completely destroyed by an explosion, could my own consciousness still exist?

Suppose a surgeon slowly cuts out parts of my brain and at some point, I am definitely not conscious. Suppose instead, I undergo extreme mental changes but no matter what mental anguish, happiness, etc you induce, you find I remain a conscious being. To you, these two experiments don’t provide evidence that consciousness arises from the physical body?

I think it’s abundantly clear that consciousness is an emergent property of the brain. If you claim otherwise, provide evidence for it.

[crazygringo]

Conscious awareness appears to be a fundamental aspect of the universe -- as fundamental as the four known fundamental forces -- and physics is concerned with describing the laws of the universe.

How could consciousness not be lumped in with physics, from this perspective?

It doesn't matter whether consciousness pervades the universe in a form of panpsychism, or is emergent out of interactions we already understand. Fluid mechanics is emergent too, in a sense -- that doesn't put it outside of physics.

[yongjik]

Fluid mechanics might actually be a good analogy. We know that fluid mechanics happens, and it's entirely made of already known physical interactions, yet the phenomenon is so complicated that it deserves to be its own field of study.

On the other hand, asking something like "Is viscosity a part of the fabric of the universe?" would be meaningless, because viscosity is not a property of any elementary particle or force. The complication arises out of how those groups of particles interact with each other.

At least, with fluid mechanics, there's a good physical abstraction that reduces real world phenomena into partial differential equations which work surprisingly well. When it comes to consciousness, we can't even ask "What's the consciousness per gram of this substance?" and I doubt such a question will become meaningful any time soon.

[some_furry]

> Conscious awareness appears to be a fundamental aspect of the universe -- as fundamental as the four known fundamental forces -- and physics is concerned with describing the laws of the universe.

Why do you believe this to be true?

If it's a self-evident observation, try explaining it to me like I'm 5.

[crazygringo]

Sure, ELI5: the only things we actually know are from our conscious experience. Everything else we have to logically infer from those conscious experiences. Literally everything is built upon our conscious awareness. We have direct experience of our conscious awareness before we can even do physics to determine the four fundamental forces at all.

To clarify, consciousness isn't just a fundamental aspect of the universe -- for our human minds, it's the most fundamental aspect.

If you want to take this to an extreme: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idealism

[some_furry]

That's an interesting philosophy, but I don't see how consciousness is implied by the standard model or the current investigations into physics beyond the standard model.

[crazygringo]

It isn't. It still has to be integrated with it, that's the whole point. We don't know how gravity is implied by the standard model either, but we still know it's there.

The point is that, at the end of the day, it's still necessarily going to be physics.

[some_furry]

I'm not a philosopher. I did study physics in college.

I do not see it necessary for consciousness to be as fundamental as electroweak interactions and so on. In my mind, it's perfectly possible for consciousness to be an emergent property of a complex system that itself is not conscious in any meaningful way.

Look at other examples of this; i.e. tensegrity.

To conclude that consciousness is as fundamental as bosons or gravity needs a lot of evidence.

Since you said so definitively that you believe that conclusion is true, I was hoping you had specific evidence on hand.

[fatfingerd]

You've just demonstrated the anthropic principle. Intelligent contemplation requires a lot of things so we will see them and can see them as fundamental, but they might be obscure in the universe.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic_principle

[crazygringo]

No, you are misunderstanding the anthropic principle. That merely explains statistical things such as why it might be hard to find intelligent life elsewhere.

The anthropic principle is a concept we've created out of our conscious observation of the universe. But take away our consciousness and you take away any and all of our knowledge of any universe whatsoever.

Consciousness cannot be "obscure" when it is the basis for one's own experienced reality, the substrata underlying everything else. Consciousness experience is fact; our conceptual understanding of the universe is mere theory. Well-tested theory, but theory nonetheless.

[fatfingerd]

> Consciousness cannot be "obscure" when it is the basis for one's own experienced reality, the substrata underlying everything else.

That you can do any of this has consciousness as a precondition, it is of significance to us but we are most likely a statistical anomaly in the Universe. It is statistically probable that we have this rather fragile viewpoint on the Universe, that's only available in small places for short times, because consciousness has preconditions.

For people who work in or consume TV and film maybe the video camera seems fundamental to the nature of the world, but it wasn't very important before it was created.

[amelius]

Not the parent commenter, but perhaps this helps:

1. Some people believe that conscious awareness exists on top of physics. I.e., something happens and conscious awareness notes that it happens. Here there is a flow of information going from physics to (our) conscious awareness. But not necessarily in the other direction.

2. The above (1) is not likely to be the true. We discuss conscious awareness in this physical world. Hence physics "knows" that conscious awareness exists, and thus there is at least also a flow of information in the other direction.

One might go further, and start questioning whether it is physics that does not really exist, and only our conscious awareness exists ...

[some_furry]

What about physics implies consciousness?

I've often heard some hand-wavy remarks about quantum physics, but they're largely unconvincing.

For example, a wavefunction will collapse because we use e.g. photons to measure a particle as it enters one of two slits. It's the act of measurement, not the introduction of a conscious mind, that causes the collapse. So that doesn't track.

[jemmyw]

Funny because the whole argument does work better if you imagine the proponents are 5. "I'm special therefore the universe must care about me and my thoughts"

[cscurmudgeon]

I hate that most education systems don’t teach that physics has its roots in philosophy and some of the most rigorous recent math stems from philosophy (Gödel) leading to vacuous gatekeeping comments like this.

[krapp]

Chemistry has its roots in alchemy, but that doesn't mean alchemy deserves to be treated with the same respect and seriousness as chemistry.

Medicine has its roots in witchcraft but that doesn't mean witchcraft deserves to be treated with the same respect and seriousness as medicine.

Astronomy has its roots in astrology, but that doesn't mean astrology deserves to be treated with the same respect and seriousness as astronomy.

Philosophy isn't physics, and philosophy doesn't deserve to be treated like physics. The premise that panpsychism - which is essentially the basis for all animist and shamanic religions (the belief that all things have an innate mind or will) should be treated as a peer to relativity or quantum mechanics is absurd.

I mean, quoting directly from TFA:

    Part of the appeal of panpsychism is that it appears to provide a workaround to the question posed by Chalmers: we no longer have to worry about how inanimate matter forms minds because mindedness was there all along, residing in the fabric of the universe. Chalmers himself has embraced a form of panpsychism and even suggested that individual particles might be somehow aware. He said in a TED Talk that a photon “might have some element of raw, subjective feeling, some primitive precursor to consciousness.”

We're to take seriously, as a scientific claim, that individual particles are aware and have feelings. That when a ball rolls downhill, it's because the ball wants to roll downhill. That when it rains, it's because Mother Earth weeps. It isn't gatekeeping to reject such nonsense, it's simply garbage collection.

[heavenlyblue]

Citations needed

[krapp]

Citations needed for what? The last 5000 years of human history? The individual developmental history of every branch of philosophy and science, their relationships and the iterative models of reality each developed over the centuries? You need citations to prove that witchcraft, astrology and alchemy do not provide valid models of reality?

No, do that yourself, if you're so inclined.

[heavenlyblue]

No I just think you have shared a bunch of anecdotes and that you are not a history geek in the first place.

[opportune]

Gödel was a logician, which is practically mathematics. “Philosophy” includes everything from that to stoned Berkeley undergrads convincing each other that getting stoned must have been what led humans to develop consciousness from other apes

[orwin]

When a philosophy has enough proofs and credibility, it becomes a science. Also, I do not think you can call logician philosophers. Lewis Carroll wouldn't.

Agree that the gatekeeping is a bit much, but doesn't warranted a swipe imho.

[BasedAnon]

>When a philosophy has enough proofs and credibility, it becomes a science

I completely disagree with this notion of science. To me science is the practice of analysing findings from controlled experimentation and then deriving predictive, reproducible and falsifiable hypotheses.

[saled]

Why do you think that collecting evidence from experiments leads to truth though? What about the process gives you certainty?

What evidence is important to making progress and what evidence is irrelevant?

What does progress in understanding an area look like? Why should we undertake it?

These are questions of philosophy, no experiments can answer them.

[BasedAnon]

>Why do you think that collecting evidence from experiments leads to truth though?

I don't, but I find that it produces results that are instrumental, and I assume that the past behaves analogously to the future, and similar situations behave similarly because this has generally been true in my experience.

>Why should we undertake it?

I'm religious, so certain science is useful to me in accomplishing my goal of attaining heaven.

>These are questions of philosophy, no experiments can answer them.

I agree.

[rvba]

I thought physics has its roots in mathmatics, but those religious articles never show any equations.

[BasedAnon]

We can construct an analytical language to interrogate these claims, but that wouldn't change the underlying fact that it is not physics or math.

[calibas]

It's not just physics, all of modern science is built upon empiricist philosophy.

[BasedAnon]

I'm well aware the physics is just 'natural philosophy', that doesn't make it anymore reasonable to start using it as the tool for metaphysics. It's a clear category error, like trying to use food chemistry to elucidate cognitive psychology in a literal sense.

[bradleyishungry]

I think the neuroscientists who question why a first-person-perspective happens in the brain generally assume it comes about from the physical formation of electromagnetic fields. Most don’t believe there’s some unexplored part of the universe that forms it, just that its something to do with the structure. So its still physics, just not pseudoscience.

I am certainly not well versed on the field though and have only read a paper on the topic, and it could have been bad science, but I did find it informative when I read it.

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnhum.2022.7676...

[nico]

> What's the deal with these things being lumped in with physics?

Definition of natural philosophy:

> natural science, especially physical science

Physics at its core is philosophy, and its models, as sophisticated or complete as may be, can never be separated from an interpreter

Religion is also in great part philosophy, and both physics and religion similarly arise from a drive to understand the nature of the universe

All of these things intersect, and the article is about one of those points of intersection

Which angle you want to take is your own personal choice. But please don’t be so quick to dismiss others’ interest in probing at the fundamentals of the universe just because you don’t agree with the way they go about it

[thomassmith65]

It doesn't at all seem like reaching for religion to me; seems materialist as can be. If consciousness isn't a phenomenon that requires a soul to explain, surely it's appropriate for physicists to study its nature. To call consciousness 'part of the fabric of the universe' seems like a fancy way of arguing that consciousness is a property of matter - and does it make sense, to a materialist, to call it anything else?

[adr1an]

Well, to be fair even Isaac Newton was searching for 'meaningfulness'.

[baz00]

It's down at the bottom of the stack.