[mordymoop]

Over time I've found that by far the highest ROI move in a consciousness debate is to simply ask "Oh, interesting. How do you know that?" and watch everyone on all sides flounder. It's one of the few places where otherwise smart people make confident statements that they don't even realize they can't support until they're asked to try. The intuitions are so strong that they seem to swamp reason.

This has caused my own position, over time, to be a deep agnosticism about what's actually going on.

[HarHarVeryFunny]

The major reason for the never-ending disagreements on the nature of consciousness is that pretty much 100% of the time no-one ever rigorously defines what (things) they are actually talking about, and the word is so overloaded and poorly defined that any discussion therefore devolves into people talking about different things, as well as the discussion being so vague as to be meaningless.

There are of course other reasons too, with things like religious beliefs and human ego meaning that people come to the discussion with a major bias and fixed views rather than even being open to any rational discussion.

Finally, everyone is conscious and has an opinion, but only a tiny fraction are actually knowledgeable about the brain and have spent any large amount of time thinking about things like evolution and brain development .. they have an opinion, but are just not qualified to discuss it!

If you break down all the different things that people are referring to when they talk about "consciousness", and define them individually with as little wiggle room as the english language and underlying taxonomy of concepts allows, then I really don't think there is much mystery about consciousness at all, but of course those with an agenda who want there to be a mystery will still argue about every part of it including the definitions that remove all the wiggle room.

The nature of consciousness has long been a contentious subject, and one of interest, but it seems that the rise of AI has intensified the discussion with the new question being whether AI is or could be conscious. I do think this can be answered in a principled way (=yes), but in the end you can only PROVE that something, or someone else, is conscious if you accept a functional/testable definition of it in the first place.

[raincom]

One can build scientific theories without rigorously defining terms: a stipulative definition is enough.

Best example is Darwin's "Origin of Species"; here, Darwin didn't rigorously define "species": 'No one definition has as yet satisfied all naturalists; yet every naturalist knows vaguely what he means when he speaks of a species.'

Many in the social sciences fetishize definitions, operating under the false notion that formulating a precise definition is the primary goal of inquiry. In reality, a robust scientific theory is a structured set of hypotheses; when combined with auxiliary theories, it derives a specific set of testable consequences.

Even within this framework, one must remain vigilant against ad hoc explanations. An ad hoc explanation fails to provide genuine systemic insight because it is engineered solely to fit the target phenomenon; it eliminates the explanatory gap by simply re-stating or absorbing the explanandum without offering any independent predictive or falsifiable power.

[D-Machine]

But with "consciousness" we don't have even a stipulative definition, more like 40 different competing definitions (https://philpapers.org/rec/VIMMAT) which are in many cases only loosely related, and generally are talking about very different things. When the situation is this bad, I am skeptical you can make scientific progress.

[raincom]

Stipulative definition is all about fixing the reference. Or if we want to use the talk of meaning, it is abou the extension/denotation. If 100 people fix the reference of the word 'consciousness' to 100 different things, it just means that these people are engaging in philosophical discussions without having any object level theories (theories from neuroscience, etc).

If 10 different scientists who work at the object level, using the same word but with a different reference, then we have 10 different theories about different phenomena. This is what we need today: more research, not philosophical discussions.

[HarHarVeryFunny]

I'd say that comes down to a matter of degree, and as a quibble it's certainly not a scientific theory if it's not worded sufficiently precisely to be testable and falsifiable. With Darwin it was really about where did all the variety of animals come from, and with speciation/variation being a process rather than an event, it really doesn't make much difference how one defines "species" (can't interbreed is a useful starting point). Of course Darwin was also just speculating about some mechanism of hereditability existing, so at the time this was more of a thought experiment than theory.

The trouble with discussion of "consciousness" is the sheer degree of ill-definedness - it is such a hand wavy and multi-facted concept, that it's not possible to even begin any meaningful discussion without defining a better vocabulary and breaking the concept down into pieces. Are you talking about subjective experience, mental awareness, free-will, altered state of consciousness, or what, or more likely simultaneously some mish-mash of all of the above and more!

[ericmay]

> The major reason for the never-ending disagreements on the nature of consciousness is that pretty much 100% of the time no-one ever rigorously defines what (things) they are actually talking about, and the word is so overloaded and poorly defined that any discussion therefore devolves into people talking about different things, as well as the discussion being so vague as to be meaningless.

You're right, but that rigorous definition is a significant part of the problem. We have a very difficult time rigorously defining and then debating certain attributes about consciousness or related concepts precisely because the definition and exploration of the definition is what is being debated.

This makes it a very fascinating topic.

For my own pet theory I think consciousness as we like to understand it is an emergent and evolutionary social construct for cooperation amongst humans, and different people may have different levels of conscious thoughts, similar to how mammals are conscious in a different way amongst other species. It's a spectrum. There are, in fact, philosophical zombies.

[aerodexis]

> with things like religious beliefs and human ego meaning that people come to the discussion with a major bias and fixed views rather than even being open to any rational discussion.

You're forgetting that attempting to have a "rational" discussion is itself a bias inherited from the many centuries of intellectual development that occurred between the middle ages and now - the parts that the article conveniently skips over entirely.

The "debate" here doesn't function to generate an answer, but to narrow down the scope of the question into the very constrained domain. When ppl debate "consciousness" they are re-affirming their opinion that humans are inherently rational agents (hence "scire" -> "to know"), rather than agents that can live, feel, think and will, which would require a different term, like "soul".

[HarHarVeryFunny]

> rather than agents that can live, feel, think and will, which would require a different term, like "soul"

You're just substituting one ill-defined, and overloaded, word ("consciousness") with a bunch of others ("live", "feel", etc), and asserting that to you they mean something different.

It's impossible to have a discussion on this basis, and I'm sure to many people "soul" is exactly what they mean by "consciousness", or at least part of it. It's no less reasonable that an AI has a soul as that it is conscious - it depends on exactly what you define those words to mean.

[aerodexis]

People have made due with conceptual fuzziness, I think it's disingenuous to suggest that discussion is impossible without absolute conceptual clarity. All you are saying is that using these terms does not allow you to have a specific kind of discussion - which, a lot of the time, is one that reduces humans to mathematical objects that perform computations.

Yet, if that is your goal and the definition of "soul" or "consciousness" are entirely arbitrary decisions that you don't care about - then it's worth remembering the adage "you may not care about politics, but politics cares about you".

[HarHarVeryFunny]

> People have made due with conceptual fuzziness

Yes, but as noted elsewhere in this thread it's a matter of degree. Consciousness is such an ill-defined and overloaded word that it's hard to say it really means anything - it's more of an all-encompassing term for a bunch of largely subjective phenomena.

[aerodexis]

I don't disagree - for a long while I believed that the study of "consciousness" was the result of a linguistic mixup and best dealt w/ via Wittgenstein.

However, if you move past surface appearances, you can think about what kind of cultural "work" is being done spending effort on this mixup. What's happening is that, in the noosphere, the cloud of concepts around "consciousness" is battling it out with the cloud of concepts around "soul" over which cloud of concepts best describes what it means to be human, with big implications on what it means to be good person. Now we're dealing with a mix of Aquinas and Latour.

[dpark]

> they have an opinion, but are just not qualified to discuss it! … I really don't think there is much mystery about consciousness at all

Are you actually qualified to discuss this by your criteria?

[HarHarVeryFunny]

I'm not a professional neuroscientist for sure, but I've certainly spent decades thinking about things like intelligence and evolution, perception, qualia, have read dozens of papers on subjects like cortical microarchitecure, etc, and would like to think I'm well enough informed to be able to discuss things like intelligence and consciousness.

[dpark]

I don’t really care about whether you are “qualified” by your criteria, because I don’t hold your view that there is some specific level of education that allows one to hold and express an opinion. My point was more to point out some potential hypocrisy.

No one is obligated to humor or debate amateurs because no one is obligated to humor or debate anyone[1]. But being an amateur does not mean that the person couldn’t hold a valid or meaningful viewpoint. Dismissing someone’s opinion specifically because they are an amateur is just a special case of appeal to authority. If their opinions are fundamentally flawed, then those can be addressed head on without resorting to insisting that they don’t have the right qualifications to participate in the discussion.

[1] The “faster than light” neutrinos come to mind, too. Scientists involved in the experiments explicitly said they didn’t have time to entertain amateur theories, a valid statement.

[HarHarVeryFunny]

Being an amateur has no bearing on how knowledgeable someone is about a subject, but for an opinion to be useful (or just interesting) it needs to be backed up with some grounded rationale, otherwise it is just that - an opinion.

[dpark]

Trouble is you don’t how much time anyone else has spent studying. How can you tell who else has “spent decades thinking about things like intelligence and evolution, perception, qualia, have read dozens of papers on subjects like cortical microarchitecure”? You can’t but you still dismiss others as unqualified.

> it needs to be backed up with some grounded rationale

This was my point. Address the claim and not the qualifications.

[Nasrudith]

My best contribution to that sort of debate is experience with general anesthesia. I recall being in a disconnected state wondering idly if I had died of complications without any fear as I could not feel my heartbeat or embodied emotions. That implies a heavily embodied component to consciousness. It is all body so not quite dualism but it does provide some limited observational evidence of distinct components. Combine that with what I have heard about the mechanism of anesthesia working by disabling nerve transmission that suggests that a disembodied but supported brain which does not have neural access to sensory feedbacks would be rather stoic to emotionless.

[mannanj]

That's nice. Do you have a go to for conversations with less mindful people or people without a training in meditation/mindfulness? For example, for people who have no experience and yet speak from a frame of strong identity and identification to their thoughts as though they are them, I like to ask "Who's the one who witnesses the thoughts?" and it kind of ties a brain-knot in their head.

Funny enough most people who don't want to meditate or practice mindfulness, also get dissuaded from the dissonance this brings up, and like the old me, just move on to more comfortable conversation.

[horacemorace]

From an internal perspective, thoughts are both the witness and the witnessed. The problem only comes when trying to apply our language which is firmly rooted in this artificial dualism.

[bluejay2387]

"It's one of the few places where otherwise smart people make confident statements that they don't even realize they can't support until they're asked to try."

It's 'one' of the few places? That behaviorism seems to be define almost all modern discourse from politics to health care including about 95% of Hacker News posts as far as I can tell...

[lanstin]

Certainty would definitely appear to be premature when we don’t understand the physical characteristics or causes of consciousness. Hell, we don’t quite yet understand a cell in good mechanical detail, much less the full body/mind of a primate. Don’t know is a reasonable posture, but of course the investigators get enthused with hypothesis generation and testing. That is their job and their karma is to over generalize each useful model.

[GoblinSlayer]

Naturalistic theories tend to work better, and science is inching in towards the problem, so far it was naturalistic.

[BoxOfRain]

I still think we're looking for a shadow by shining a torch at it personally; we have a rather chauvinistic view on what consciousness 'ought' to look like and this fundamentally shapes what we're looking for. We assume that consciousness has to resemble human consciousness, something we can't even measure very well in people let alone extrapolate into other kinds of being.

For the sake of argument, let's take a particularly long-lived species and say oak trees have some form of awareness. An oak tree's perception of time would be completely out of line with ours, from its perspective it'd be this writhing, visibly expanding thing that can't even register individual humans since we're there for such a short period of its existence. If it were aware on some level, we wouldn't be able to tell either way because we can only really conceive of human-like minds; even though an 'oak tree mind' would look nothing like ours because it would be driven by entirely different evolutionary conditions. I don't think it's possible for us to be entirely objective when it comes to naturalistic theories of consciousness, we cannot avoid being biased by our 'version' of what we're studying.

[michaelmrose]

Mold is reactive in some senses but an equal mass of brain cells probably can be said to produce more abstract computation about self and other matters.

It may not ultimately be very useful to define consciousness so broadly as to include the tree whilst being willing to include mind's unalike our own.

It seems to me that it must necessarily include abstract computation inclusive of the self and volition separate from simple processes taking place in individual cells.

While it may be accurate to describe our own selves as the sum of our individual cells operations it is also possible to look at it top down as accurately.

I'm not sure that the tree grew towards the light or the mold towards moisture is as meaningful a concept as the monkey climbed the tree to eat the fruit and I don't think the distinction is the similarities to self.

I don't believe that the tree had within itself an organized center with a computed symbol for light or growth.

I also don't think it contains any ability to change the fixed computation represented by the system of it's cells or to arrive at different speculative computation of past or future.

[jdiaz5513]

I agree with you except for one important nuance:

I think what many people are doing is looking for something that is fundamentally a higher dimensional object (dim>4) which casts a 4D spacetime shadow (our bodies) by shining a torch on _that_ shadow. Still doesn't allow for any satisfying direct observation.

This kind of dimensional analysis is part of the focus of my current research program.

[nradov]

Work better in what sense? Do naturalistic theories have more predictive power?

[GoblinSlayer]

Predictive power, explanatory power, precision, consistency and matching evidence.

[nradov]

Really? Do you have a citation for that?

[GoblinSlayer]

I suppose, it's a self fulfilling prophecy: supernaturalists aren't concerned with predictive power, they pursue intuition power, if a theory confirms a preconceived hypothesis, then it's a quality theory.

[alexashka]

They know because of the algorithm:

Hear a thing and store it and the associated vibe - yay/nay.

Step 2:

Mindlessly repeat stored information and vibe when it feels appropriate.

Step 3:

Wait for somebody else to do the work of refuting/verifying your info + vibe.

Step 4:

Go to step 1.

When you realize this is what all people are doing almost all of the time (and many, all of the time), you are liberated.