I knew the answers to these questions on every psychedelic trip I ever took. Afterwards, I didn't remember what the answer was, but I knew there was an answer and that was a bit of progress that could get me through a day, a year, a decade, many decades. I seem to feel most drawn to answer #4, a field that permeates spacetime. Yep, I almost recall that that is the beginning answer.
Consciousness is an ordinary evolved characteristic, like legs or jawbones. Organisms with a greater endowment of physical capacities that permitted meta-regulatory behaviour were more reproductively successful than those with less.
Awareness, and self-awareness, are powerful behavioural regulatory tools.
Does this "contradict physics"?
It happened. Ergo it does not contradict physics, even if we don't understand it.
Declarations of impossibility do not have a good history when talking about evolution, so I'm happy wallowing in ignorance for another few thousand years while we dig more deeply into the details and understand what's going on better. While doing so I like to meditate on Orgel's second law: Evolution is smarter than I am.
There's already a bunch of stuff we know, like conscious control only comes into play when everything else fails, and that conscious likes to think it's in charge, so any experiments that involve choices that *could* be made subconsciously (all the action potential work, so far as I know) are investigating the subconscious, not consciousness.
But we also know consciousness is capable of solving problems non-conscious intelligence can't--there's a theorem by Church that demonstrates we can solve the halting problem for cases a Turing machine, the ultimate unconscious intelligence, can't--so that's a strong pointer that it evolved for purely utilitarian reasons, like everything else.
Again: I don't know *how* this happened or how it works, but the why is pretty clear: consciousness is an evolved capability that allows organisms that possess it to regulate their behaviour in ways that organisms lacking it can't. Not knowing how it works is just ordinary science, in a state of total confusion for decades or centuries while we figure it out. But in this case at least we know where to look!
I don't think the fact that we are conscious and created evolution implies that consciousness *per-se* increases reproductive fitness. The seemingly-more-plausible possibility is that evolution created brains with ability to think so they could perform good actions without "knowing" about qualia, and in the process "accidentally" created consciousness. That's possible (after all, we _are_ conscious, so one explanation must be true!) but it just seems weird—and even more weird when you think about feelings.
It is very much not the case that there is any such theorem of Church. If we can prove some Turing machine will halt, then some Turing machine can do that too.
I have actually listened to that exact podcast! When I hear him, I feel like I agree with everything I understand, but there's a lot of things he says that I don't understand and he says those things with a degree of confidence that I find kind of baffling.
awesome! i kind of echo your sentiment. Do you feel his explanation that the reason we feel is because “it’s written into the story” is simply too vague? answering the wrong question? not an answer? something else?
I guess it's a very general thing which is true of lots of explanations of consciousness (and lots of other things): When someone gives an explanation that you don't understand, it's hard to know if that's just because you haven't put in enough work to understand it, or because the explanation is lacking.
Like, if someone starts talking about the Dirac equation, I don't really understand it. But I still believe it is true because there's a clear program of what I'm supposed to learn in order to understand it, and lots of smart people seem to have followed that program and trust the conclusions.
I think this (the "hard problem of consciousness") is the type of problem that feels mysterious because of an assumed Cartesian dualism. As in, the assumption is that what we each really are is a detached, purely neutral observer that can sense what is going on without any messy contact with reality. Or in other words, that the mind is a container that merely represents nature rather than actually being a part of it. When you start with these assumptions, yes, it does feel very mysterious how such a pure separate thing that merely represents facts could interact with the world of matter. I think if you don't start with the assumption that the mind is over and above and separate from matter, then the problem doesn't feel as mysterious. Basically the answer is that feelings aren't something tacked on excessively to minds, but they are (part of) the functioning of the mind.
For related ideas on pragmatist views of the mind:
1 - Feelings ARE useful as ways of processing and communicating stimulation both internally and externally.
2 - Consciousness is just the ability to communicate with one's self which is, for now, less useful as it often leads to things like "why am I here?" and over analysation = depression...
Thank you very much for taking this question seriously. I've struggled with it all my life (as I talk about https://www.losingmyreligions.net/ ) but so few people really take it seriously. It is simply crazy that matter and energy evolved into something that feels!
Maybe I missed the argument against Answer 1, but I’m not sure why you discard so fast the idea that consciousness could do anything (the ability to “push atoms”). Ignoring for an instant the issue of “where it comes from”, consciousness appears intuitively to be one of several agents in the brain that influence behavior to maximize gene replication. It’s one link in the chain of checks that culminate in taking action. It might very well be a deterministic process of atoms firing in a pattern shaped by experience, but it’s still atoms moving around, leading to more atoms moving around (or not, if you “decide” not to act), all according to the laws of physics. So, consciousness IS helpful and capable.
Now, why is it “there”? I think it has to do with “memory”, memory of both the past and the future. Consciousness is what ties your self to time, the process by which you remember who you (whatever that is) were the moment before (let’s call that “refresh rate”), recursively all the way back until the process started. That’s the past. But it’s also the process by which you can plan the future, because it assumes consistency of the world model of the past into the future. Feelings are part of this process, and equally helpful. Memories of good feelings will reshape the pattern of neurons in a way that pushes you to pursue the behaviors in the future. Memories of painful feelings will push you to avoid them. Bio organisms that didn’t abide by these laws of physics plucked themselves out of the gene pool.
Reasonable enough so far? Still, why do we report consciousness? My take is that it’s a necessary property of any system that keeps a model of the world consistent over time, and evaluates that model. Once there is a model of the world that can be evaluated, or “scanned”, or “watched”, consciousness simply is where you put the camera. Saying “I am conscious” is the response you give to all stimuli that amount to “where is the camera?”. It’s not _doing_ anything, but it’s there, which is why I think it’s sometimes referred to as an “illusion”. More, by contrapositive, it cannot be not there, because if it weren’t then your brain couldn’t have a model of the world that remains consistent over time.
So the key ingredients for consciousness seem to be: a ** sensory input system**, that can shape a **memory store**, which is in turn scanned by an **evaluation program** that leads to **output in the form of action**. Note that by this definition, animals are definitely conscious, in much the same way humans are (stones and thermostats, not so much). And, for better or worse, that affords computer programs a shot at consciousness. Right now, the level of consciousness they reach is infinitesimal: both the range of their inputs and the architecture of their memory stores are incapable of holding much of a model of the world (compared to us at least). More importantly, the refresh rate of their evaluation program, their “scanning” of the memory, is extremely low (I’m not talking about CPU cycles, but rather input-update-evaluate-act cycles, which in a game of minesweeper will happen perhaps 50 times? 50 moments of consciousness of a 10x10 grid of mines and safe spots is not a lot, but it’s not nothing). If all these shortcomings are addressed in the future, I’d bet money that these programs will report consciousness any time you ask.
Maybe I’m wrong for finding that answer “satisfying enough”, but it does the trick for me.
TL;DR: consciousness emerges because time exists as a continuous function updating the universe, as per the laws of physics (can’t help you with those though).
Honestly I think you're right—I shouldn't discount possibility #1 so much. I think that consciousness and feelings are so hard to explain that they justify unlikely-seeming possibilities. For example, my understanding is that the "microtubules theory" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orchestrated_objective_reduction) is a proposed idea of how consciousness could exist and could exert a kind of free at the quantum level. As far as I can tell this isn't a majority view, but really, I don't know enough about quantum physics to have the right to have an opinion.
Your arguments all start from the standpoint that consciousness and physical reality are of different and completely separate natures, which is why answer #1 talks about magical "little souls" which could not possibly be causally effective because (by definition) they are non-physical.
The best kind of naturalist answers that I've seen to this question is the idea that they are actually one and the same thing. Evolution created organisms with brains able to form enduring patterns of attraction / repulsion for classes of objects, because of obvious benefits, and since the world in which these organisms live is quite complex and changing, it also created a system of attention, i.e some kind of brain module that shuts most of the sensory input out most of the time, so that neural resources can be applied to one thing at a time. That is what we know as "paying attention", and we see even animals doing it. At least with higher animals like monkeys and apes, and probably most mammals, these is also an internal model of the world that is rich enough to include a representation of the individual itself within it (known in psychology as "self"). When you put these two together, you get the possibility to "pay attention to self", which has all the ingredients needed for the human individual to be able to say something like "I feel sad" in response to its own internal state after a loss. But then, if we've explained the ability to say the sentence, and in the absence of any intentional deception, we've also explained how the individual comes to "feel sadness" itself.
I think ideas in this area go by names like "embodied cognition". It's probably not 100% the same thing, but philosophers have elaborated theories called "neutral monism" which are also kind of in this area: what is really there is not what we know as matter or what we know as consciousness, but something prior to both.
Then of course there is panpsychism - consciousness came first, and pysicality just appears in it. There is an obvious tension with the mathematical regularity of science, but experientially it's unassailable.
And before we discount mind-body dualism entirely - the "detached, purely neutral observer" that N0st mentions as a problematic assumption is exactly what many advanced practitioners of meditation have reported!
"Answer 1" can be seen as dualism. "Answer 3" can (I think) be seen as your second paragraph or embodied cognition. "Answer 3" and "Answer 4" are also variants of panpsychism. (For what it's worth, I lean towards answer 4, but I wasn't trying to argue for any particular view.)
"It just happens in this answer that the 'this is good do more of this' pattern evolution programmed into your brain also manifest as 'a sentience experiencing pleasure'. That’s weird.'
I pasted your article into ChatGPT 4 and asked it to "Summarize" and then "Create a new explanation" and I think it elaborated a bit on your #4 with this one:
=====================
Explanation 5: Panpsychism and Evolutionary Interaction
In this explanation, we consider that consciousness and feelings are inherent properties of the universe, as suggested by panpsychism. According to panpsychism, all matter possesses some form of consciousness, albeit at different levels of complexity.
When evolution came into play, it didn't create consciousness or feelings but instead developed mechanisms for these inherent properties to interact with the physical world. In other words, evolution fine-tuned the connections between consciousness, feelings, and biological organisms, allowing the organisms to have experiences and respond accordingly.
As organisms became more complex, their consciousness and feelings also evolved, enabling them to adapt and survive in various environments. This process led to the development of sophisticated neural networks, such as the human brain, where consciousness and feelings could interact with cognitive processes in more intricate ways.
In this perspective, consciousness and feelings are not created by evolution or any external force but are natural properties of the universe that become more refined and interconnected through evolutionary processes. This explanation suggests that the relationship between consciousness, feelings, and evolution is one of mutual interaction and co-development rather than a one-way influence.
This is a good angle. My suspicion is that "consciousness" is mostly a muddled, confused term. It shares a lot of discursive properties with "elan vital", which seems suspicious. Showing the parallel with "feelings" like you do is a nice way to highlight that aspect—Does anyone really believe in something like panemotionism?
That said, operationalizations of consciousness are where the meaty discussions happen, IMO. I recently was reading an article (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy? Wikipedia?) that overviewed current testing methodologies for subquestions that intersect concepts like consciousness, awareness, perception, intentionality, etc. Wish I could find it again.
Consciousness (or "feelings") is a strange term in that on the one hand, it's quite rather hazy and hard to define. On the the other hand, one can argue that it's the singe thing that we can have the most confidence in being real ("cogito, ergo sum" and all that). I'm not sure, but I tend to think that it's best to treat consciousness as kind of an "atom" in our definition of the world, where it's impossible to define it in terms of other things.
Even if it there's some primitive ontological feature of the universe that maps onto "consciousness", defeating attempts at reduction, that feature behaves and interacts with other features of the universe. Actually sitting down and trying to concretely operationalize those interactions, in my experience at least, has mostly ended up dissolving the "consciousness"-labeled node in my conceptual graph.
In terms of meta-discourse, I think that that "cogito, ergo sum" mostly functions as an appeal to intuition. Sure, I too have one or more Cartesian processes in my mind making assertions like, "I exist", "I am", etc, but it's an entirely different thing to try mapping those cognitive assertions onto other features of the world.
From a pure logical perspective, *cogito, ergo sum* kind of looks like it's begging the question. Expanded out a bit, "There is an I object that performs an action called 'thinking'; therefore, the I object exists."
Perhaps more interestingly, however, is that if you treat *cogito, ergo sum* as a process instead of an epistemic assertion, it turns into something more like "I think, therefore I am, which is a thought, therefore I am, which is a thought, therefore ..." ad infinitum. In other words, it behaves somewhat like a tight recursive loop, which is why it begs the question when rendered as a logical statement.
If you allow the above and agree that our intuitions about "being conscious" are epistemically confused, I think there's still a lot of room to ask about the phenomenology surrounding the Cartesian belief/intuition itself. Wildly speculating, if you think of the brain as a dynamical system with lots of feedback loops, it's not *entirely* surprising that you might end up in regimes where small degenerate feedback loops arise.
> If you allow the above and agree that our intuitions about "being conscious" are epistemically confused
Consciousness is an intuition that you'll have to take from my cold dead hands. 😅
Here's how I'd put it: If I were to say that rocks exist, few would criticize that statement as epistemically confused. But if you wanted to, wouldn't all the same criticisms people make about consciousness apply to it? What does it _really_ mean for rock to exist? Maybe we should just do away with that confused concept and talk about something else.
But I feel like this is an isolated demand for rigor. *All* of language is a chicken-and-egg tangle of words defined in terms of other words, with things only real grounding being the statistical patterns of how we see words being used. From that perspective, I feel like "consciousness" should be the concept with the *strongest* support, since we all experience it all the time, you know it's real even if you're living in a simulation and I'm fake, and all that.
> But if you wanted to, wouldn't all the same criticisms people make about consciousness apply to [rocks]?
Not at all! It's fairly straightforward to play Taboo™ with the word "rock" and operationalize the term into consensus reality-level procedures. They tend to be hard (Mohs ≥1 or whatever), usually found lying around in groups, typically have XYZ palette of colors, and all manner of properties found in your friendly minerology textbook.
I'm pretty sure your reductionist worldview easily admits rocks as non-ontologically primitive objects. ☺
More to the point though, I'm claiming that "all the same criticisms people make about consciousness" apply to *elan vital*. At the very least, I think that should throw in some negative log-likelihood that "consciousness" has coherent extrinsics.
> Consciousness is an intuition that you'll have to take from my cold dead hands.
Hehe. Don't get me wrong. I'm not making the stronger claim that we're all just confused p-zombies and the word "consciousness" is completely empty. The color red still appears red; however, even "redness" can be dissected into more primitive perceptive qualia if you meditate on it a bit. Rather, I'm claiming that "consciousness" vaguely gestures at a collection of phenomena which don't form a particularly cohesive whole in the same way that calling Roger Penrose + banana smell + writer's block "ballingrin" doesn't make it a coherent concept.
I am not subscribing to my own thought and will change my mind if I find other reasons, but this is what I am thinking as of today -
Perhaps consciousness is a perpetual engine that has a definitive (or not) timeline. We don’t exactly know if a child before its born has consciousness and when it comes outside the womb and breaths the hospital air that jumpstarts consciousness. Similarly when we die, where does all this awareness and sense of self and feeling go ?
It seems like some energy wave that’s abundantly available and all around us is able to jumpstart a engine called consciousness in matter that’s capable of perpetually holding on to this energy and taking on a creative direction and self evolve.
I don’t know if consciousness was intended to be this way, but we also don’t know if a lot of things were intended to how they are today in the universe.
Questions
1. If we find an alien race that’s conscious the parameters of our understanding of our own conciseness would change.
2. Does consciousness have any benefit ? Are there common benefits that we all gain from ?
3. Are your sense especially your eyes key to the concept consciousness ? What we can’t see, hear or touch impact how aware of those things ?
4. Why does when one sees something completely mind-blowing feel a sense of heightened consciousness/feeling ? The ups and down of consciousness state means it’s reactive to change or stimuli
5. When consciousness is aware of new things, does it mean the learning existed before and it was refreshed or it evolved to a new state completely like a new avatar. What happened to the old state of consciousness and where does it hide or does it vanish completely.
Bill Powers' Perceptual Control Theory (PCT) interprets all living systems as control systems. This is very different from regarding living systems as biochemical machines reacting to external stimuli as if they were billiard balls. Powers:
"Nearly all life scientists, particularly those who
try to achieve objectivity and uniform methodology,
have interpreted behavior as if it were caused by events
outside an organism acting on a mechanism that
merely responds. This hypothesis has become so in-
grained that it is considered to be a basic philosophical
principle of science. To explain behavior, one varies in-
dependent variables and records the ensuing actions;
to analyze the data, one assumes a causal link from
independent to dependent variable and calculates
a correlation or computes a transfer function. This
leads in turn to models of behaving systems in which
inputs are transformed by hypothetical processes into
motor outputs; those models lead to explorations of
inner processes (as in neurology and biochemistry)
predicated on the assumption that one is looking for
links in an input-output chain. One assumption leads
to the next until a whole structure has been built up,
one that governs our thinking at every level of analysis
from the genetic to the cognitive."
Instead of the billiard ball model, here is an example of how Powers interprets biochemistry,
"There are workers in biochemistry who are inves-
tigating feedback control processes. One significant
process involves an allosteric enzyme that is converted
into an active form by the effect of one substance, and
into an inactive form by the effect of another. When
these two substances have the same concentration,
the transition from active to inactive is balanced; the
slightest imbalance of the substances causes a highly
amplified offset toward the active or the inactive form.
In one example, the active form catalyzes a main reac-
tion, and the product of that reaction in turn enhances
the substance that converts the enzyme to the inactive
form—a closed-loop relationship. The feedback is
negative, because the active form of enzyme promotes
effects that lead to a strong shift toward the inactive
form. This little system very actively and accurately
forces the concentration of the product of the main
reaction to match the concentration of another
substance, the one that biases the enzyme toward
the active form. This allows one chemical system to
control the effects that another one is having on the
chemical environment.
A person without some training in recognizing
control processes might easily miss the fact that one
chemical concentration is accurately controlling the
product of a different reaction not directly related to
the controlling substance. The effect of this control
system is to create a relationship among concentra-
tions that is imposed by organization, not simply
by chemical laws. This is the kind of observation
that a reductionist is likely to overlook; reduction-
ism generally means failing to see the forest for the
trees. Even the workers who described this control
system mislabeled what it is doing—they concluded
that this system controls the outflow of the product,
when in fact it controls the concentration and makes
it dependent on a different and chemically-unrelated
With PCT in place, human purpose and feelings have an engineering basis, consistent with physics, but based on the organizational control systems of the human organism (rather than responding to external stimuli as if we were billiard balls). Thus here is how he explains emotions,
"So-called emotional behavior is simply ordinary
behavior. However, strong feelings are involved
because the errors are considered very important,
so a small error produces a large output, and large
outputs call for strenuous action and a high degree
of physiological preparedness to support the action.
The technical term for this state is “high loop gain.”
In most circumstances the actions take place, the error
is corrected before it can become large, and the physi-
ological state returns to normal with no noticeable
emotional state being seen. But if the actions are not
allowed or if they fail to correct the error, the result is
a continued state of preparation that does not return
to normal, and the result is what we recognized as an
emotional state.
Therefore emotional behavior and emotional
thinking are simply ordinary behavior and think-
ing concerning subjects which are very important
to the person, so that strong actions will be used as
required to correct errors, and even small errors are
"Feelings" are how we experience the need for our control systems to correct error.
On top of Powers universal account of living things as control systems, in the case of human beings we have:
1. "Play" or "degrees of freedom" in our systems, most likely evolved because such experimentation allowed us to adapt to more diverse conditions;
2. Cognition that allows us to assess the expected value of various uncertain courses of action;
3. High stakes social status and coalitional decisions under uncertainty; and
4. Emotionally-laden symbolic cognitive processing through culturally defined symbols (whose meaning and coalitional salience are constantly shifting)
These four additional conditions have led to an internal landscape of experiences of feelings with far greater complexity than exist for feelings of warm, cold, pain, pleasure, hunger, etc.
Ultimately in the West (and now around much of the world) the combination of high stakes uncertainty in error correction in a soup of symbolic processing gave rise to individual self-consciousness (see Julian Jaynes for the key hypothesis, even if, as Daniel Dennett says, the details of his account happen to be wrong).
Personal identity (aka "consciousness") has become part of a control system with feelings associated with error correction signals. Our error correction mechanisms today are working on multiple levels of complexity and uncertainty. Conflicting feelings have become the norm rather than the exception among many WEIRD homo sapiens.
With respect to the relationship between consciousness and physics, consciousness is no more strange than feelings in Powers account (though the fact of consciousness is still remarkable, as are many evolved living systems).
His paper on the origins of purpose coinciding with the origins of life, via control systems accidentially coming into existence in the primordial soup billions of years ago, is especially fascinating,
https://qualiacomputing.com/ has some good stuff on this, and I suspect from personal experience meditating and other people's reports that the reason people think consciousness is non-causal is because pure consciousness without formed content (imagine knowing without an object to know in particular) is very close to an informationless state. However, consciousness is used for binding (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g0YID6XV-PQ&ab_channel=Andr%C3%A9sG%C3%B3mezEmilsson) which is quite computationally important and gives a reason for it to be recruited from the EM field (https://www.mdpi.com/2076-3417/7/12/1248) by natural selection.
Can you elaborate on your first sentence? I'm fascinated but not sure I can really grasp it.
I followed qualia computing for a year or two but I felt like I was missing some kind of foundational knowledge necessary to understand what was going on and never seemed to gain it by osmosis. Sometimes the posts would involve technical concepts (Hamiltonians, annealing, etc.) that I'm familiar with and that didn't much help, so I sort of gave up. Would love to understand what is happening there!
Sure! First off, representing any information in your experience requires some symmetry breaking because otherwise there's just no differentiation between anything and anything else. Particular objects like an apple require a lot of such breaks in order to differentiate red from every other color, construct the sense of space the apple is in and specify it as in a particular spot, construct the imagined inner visual field as distinct from the outer one, tile the apple with textures, etc. Now, there're also more subtle differentiations that happen, like the distinction between awareness/consciousness of the object, and the object itself. It's possible to take the distinction that's made there and instead of having a particular object you are conscious of consciousness of consciousness of... and so on. When done quite deeply, this state doesn't contain stuff like objects or understanding of cause and effect because the number of symmetry breaks and the degree of them is too large to be supported by the state. Instead, you get a ball of "pure" consciousness that feels like pure knowing with ~epsilon interference between one knowing and another. You can also kinda imagine it as every piece of your experience doing the AND operation, or (almost, if it was perfect they'd cancel entirely) perfectly reflective particles all reflecting each other. Beyond that, there are two main historically understood states with less symmetry breaks, which are nothing (everything does NOR/everything cancels out except for a super subtle wrapper to remember the cancellation) and "neither perception nor non-perception" (actually empty of information, including time differentiation, must infer the existence of it after the fact when you notice it's been 30 minutes since you started meditating and you thought it was more like two). Anyway, because there's so little information in the state itself and because most people have an approximation of pure consciousness from looking at what is conserved between their experiences in normal conditions, it naively seems like it wouldn't be able to do anything, but a lot of that is because people do not have access to states that largely change the quantity of consciousness (and are tracking that variable) in order to see effects, like nothing or well-done consciousness without content (that is, a really small epsilon). Also, it's difficult to reason about anyway because the effects of consciousness are embedded in whatever tools you are using to reason about consciousness because they're part of your experience, so attempting to compare imagined differences between consciousness and not during usual conditions will not (trivially) reveal the effects of consciousness.
Feel free to ask more questions, I love talking about this stuff. Unfortunately it's pretty esoteric rn and tricky to understand without having good references to it within your own experience. Hopefully we get to the point where the basics have been very clearly mathematized so we can talk about it precisely without having to personally experience really wild meditative stuff!
Thank you! I must ask... do you think it's possible to understand this without having enough corresponding first-hand meditation/psychedelic experiences? I'm sad to admit that from the first sentence I'm a bit confused about what symmetry breaking is happening. I'm also confused about the distinction between awareness of an object, and the object itself. In one sense this seems very obvious: "An object is molecules in the world, awareness is something I experience". But in another sense (probably the one you're getting at) it seems *extremely* subtle: "Objects don't really exist; the world is a buzzing idiotic evolution of the wavefunction; objects are an abstraction created by my brain to help me navigate in the world successfully." In the latter case, I do indeed have trouble understanding the difference, or how an "object" can "exist" without someone being conscious of it.
I am generally pretty optimistic on people being able to understand exotic states of consciousness without directly being in them much, so probably, though it may take a bit of explanatory work. The symmetry breaking I'm referring to here is pretty subtle (though it is in all experiences, fish in water type subtle), it's any difference between part of your experience and another part of it. This also includes stuff like perceiver and perceived and is/isn't, so it's fairly tricky to reason about the super general cases. Additionally, you're on the right track with the latter case! The subject and object in this sense can not exist wholly independent of each other and are created from the same source, and this does imply that to some degree subjects are objects and objects are subjects. Another way of getting to that result is that everything in experience to some degree is like a mirror and therefore is perceived as containing a bit of the mirrored. That said, an object doesn't necessarily have to be experienced as observed by a person in order to be differentiated from another piece of experience, though of course these experiences will be happening inside humans, and the usual modes of perception preclude stuff like a large degree of objects perceiving each other without an intermediary person in the experience (I do think that some degree of this happens normally for everyone, but typically very very subtle). This also makes it hard to do and remember, because memory systems are typically quite entangled with the usual sense of self, which I suspect is part of why super-advanced meditators sometimes report worse memory. I am very much looking for ways for that to not happen to me. Anyway, the "pure consciousness" state that I referred to previously is like taking the subject/object duality of a normal perception like you seeing an apple, removing the particular informational contents of the normal subject (you) and object (apple) so that you just have structure left, then letting both the subject and object in that structure be the structure itself. After that setup there are many options for exactly how the recursion and differentiation go, plus possible variation in the quantity/amplitude of experience in a particular bit of the structure. Eventually I'd like to get more precise for replicability, but that's a good first approximation. Also, I'm going to be making some really precise analogies in the structure and mechanics of consciousness and known physical and mathematical stuff at some point in the future, so even if the previous descriptions don't help a lot I expect that we'll be able to find a lot of common grounding without having to experience the stuff directly. One in particular that I am quite excited for is the holographic properties of experience; the mechanics of taking a reference beam, splitting, reflecting one beam off of an object, then recombining the beams on a plate are basically identical to what happens a lot of the time in experience, though what exactly the plate and object are made of and how they work is a bit different. There's also some stuff that works pretty much how optical tweezers do, that will be p cool too once I describe all of this stuff in a full-length and not off the cuff post or something. Hope this helps!
I think maybe these are both the same problem. What if feelings are just an internal representation of the reward circuitry, a way of our consciousness trying to "make sense" of what just happened that made us prefer eating more pizza in the future. Using that thinking, one can also perfectly rationalize himself into eating meat - animals have outward expressions (with some evolutionary purpose, sometimes even explicitly deceiving humans) that we mistake for feelings, but since they are "zombies" we don't have to care. Or maybe everything is conscious, just with varying degrees. But I think consciousness and feelings are fundamentally interlinked
Oh, definitely, I think they are very close, and arguably the same. I just find that personally, the "feelings" phrasing sharpens the "hardness" of the problem, as it makes the alignment between the reward function programmed into my brain and my subjective experiences more puzzling. (Why should those things be so similar?)
Hello, I would just like to point something that's really bothering me: the way you talk about evolution, like it has some kind of purpose. This is really not the case, and I feel describing it this way really is harming scientific thought.
"Evolution" as we can observe emerges from conjunction of two phenomena: mutations, and selective pressure. These are very dumb phenomena, and do not "know" or "want" anything - they are forces, just like gravity.
There are multiple consequences of this:
- there is not "good" or "bad" evolutions; this doesn't make sense. All there is are random mutations, and environment that kills individuals, creating selective pressure.
- it's not because a behaviour / phenomena emerges, that it has to be related to evolution. There are plenty of mutations that barely change the fitness function of a population (see genetic drift).
Of course, when I say "evolution wants you to reproduce your genes" this is a shorthand for something like "there has long been selective pressure such that organisms that were better able to reproduce their genes had more descendants". I trust readers (like you) understand this.
I knew the answers to these questions on every psychedelic trip I ever took. Afterwards, I didn't remember what the answer was, but I knew there was an answer and that was a bit of progress that could get me through a day, a year, a decade, many decades. I seem to feel most drawn to answer #4, a field that permeates spacetime. Yep, I almost recall that that is the beginning answer.
Consciousness is an ordinary evolved characteristic, like legs or jawbones. Organisms with a greater endowment of physical capacities that permitted meta-regulatory behaviour were more reproductively successful than those with less.
Awareness, and self-awareness, are powerful behavioural regulatory tools.
Does this "contradict physics"?
It happened. Ergo it does not contradict physics, even if we don't understand it.
Declarations of impossibility do not have a good history when talking about evolution, so I'm happy wallowing in ignorance for another few thousand years while we dig more deeply into the details and understand what's going on better. While doing so I like to meditate on Orgel's second law: Evolution is smarter than I am.
There's already a bunch of stuff we know, like conscious control only comes into play when everything else fails, and that conscious likes to think it's in charge, so any experiments that involve choices that *could* be made subconsciously (all the action potential work, so far as I know) are investigating the subconscious, not consciousness.
But we also know consciousness is capable of solving problems non-conscious intelligence can't--there's a theorem by Church that demonstrates we can solve the halting problem for cases a Turing machine, the ultimate unconscious intelligence, can't--so that's a strong pointer that it evolved for purely utilitarian reasons, like everything else.
Again: I don't know *how* this happened or how it works, but the why is pretty clear: consciousness is an evolved capability that allows organisms that possess it to regulate their behaviour in ways that organisms lacking it can't. Not knowing how it works is just ordinary science, in a state of total confusion for decades or centuries while we figure it out. But in this case at least we know where to look!
https://worldofwonders.substack.com/p/the-nature-of-consciousness
I don't think the fact that we are conscious and created evolution implies that consciousness *per-se* increases reproductive fitness. The seemingly-more-plausible possibility is that evolution created brains with ability to think so they could perform good actions without "knowing" about qualia, and in the process "accidentally" created consciousness. That's possible (after all, we _are_ conscious, so one explanation must be true!) but it just seems weird—and even more weird when you think about feelings.
It is very much not the case that there is any such theorem of Church. If we can prove some Turing machine will halt, then some Turing machine can do that too.
have you listened to joscha bach? are you averse to podcasts? if no to both, would you consider listening to joscha on lex fridman and reporting back?
I have actually listened to that exact podcast! When I hear him, I feel like I agree with everything I understand, but there's a lot of things he says that I don't understand and he says those things with a degree of confidence that I find kind of baffling.
awesome! i kind of echo your sentiment. Do you feel his explanation that the reason we feel is because “it’s written into the story” is simply too vague? answering the wrong question? not an answer? something else?
I guess it's a very general thing which is true of lots of explanations of consciousness (and lots of other things): When someone gives an explanation that you don't understand, it's hard to know if that's just because you haven't put in enough work to understand it, or because the explanation is lacking.
Like, if someone starts talking about the Dirac equation, I don't really understand it. But I still believe it is true because there's a clear program of what I'm supposed to learn in order to understand it, and lots of smart people seem to have followed that program and trust the conclusions.
I think this (the "hard problem of consciousness") is the type of problem that feels mysterious because of an assumed Cartesian dualism. As in, the assumption is that what we each really are is a detached, purely neutral observer that can sense what is going on without any messy contact with reality. Or in other words, that the mind is a container that merely represents nature rather than actually being a part of it. When you start with these assumptions, yes, it does feel very mysterious how such a pure separate thing that merely represents facts could interact with the world of matter. I think if you don't start with the assumption that the mind is over and above and separate from matter, then the problem doesn't feel as mysterious. Basically the answer is that feelings aren't something tacked on excessively to minds, but they are (part of) the functioning of the mind.
For related ideas on pragmatist views of the mind:
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/dewey/#Mind
Or for a book length treatment:
Out of the Cave: A Natural Philosophy of Mind and Knowing by Don M. Tucker and Mark Johnson
Interesting book on similar ideas:
The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill by Tim Ingold
1 - Feelings ARE useful as ways of processing and communicating stimulation both internally and externally.
2 - Consciousness is just the ability to communicate with one's self which is, for now, less useful as it often leads to things like "why am I here?" and over analysation = depression...
KISS
Thank you very much for taking this question seriously. I've struggled with it all my life (as I talk about https://www.losingmyreligions.net/ ) but so few people really take it seriously. It is simply crazy that matter and energy evolved into something that feels!
Maybe I missed the argument against Answer 1, but I’m not sure why you discard so fast the idea that consciousness could do anything (the ability to “push atoms”). Ignoring for an instant the issue of “where it comes from”, consciousness appears intuitively to be one of several agents in the brain that influence behavior to maximize gene replication. It’s one link in the chain of checks that culminate in taking action. It might very well be a deterministic process of atoms firing in a pattern shaped by experience, but it’s still atoms moving around, leading to more atoms moving around (or not, if you “decide” not to act), all according to the laws of physics. So, consciousness IS helpful and capable.
Now, why is it “there”? I think it has to do with “memory”, memory of both the past and the future. Consciousness is what ties your self to time, the process by which you remember who you (whatever that is) were the moment before (let’s call that “refresh rate”), recursively all the way back until the process started. That’s the past. But it’s also the process by which you can plan the future, because it assumes consistency of the world model of the past into the future. Feelings are part of this process, and equally helpful. Memories of good feelings will reshape the pattern of neurons in a way that pushes you to pursue the behaviors in the future. Memories of painful feelings will push you to avoid them. Bio organisms that didn’t abide by these laws of physics plucked themselves out of the gene pool.
Reasonable enough so far? Still, why do we report consciousness? My take is that it’s a necessary property of any system that keeps a model of the world consistent over time, and evaluates that model. Once there is a model of the world that can be evaluated, or “scanned”, or “watched”, consciousness simply is where you put the camera. Saying “I am conscious” is the response you give to all stimuli that amount to “where is the camera?”. It’s not _doing_ anything, but it’s there, which is why I think it’s sometimes referred to as an “illusion”. More, by contrapositive, it cannot be not there, because if it weren’t then your brain couldn’t have a model of the world that remains consistent over time.
So the key ingredients for consciousness seem to be: a ** sensory input system**, that can shape a **memory store**, which is in turn scanned by an **evaluation program** that leads to **output in the form of action**. Note that by this definition, animals are definitely conscious, in much the same way humans are (stones and thermostats, not so much). And, for better or worse, that affords computer programs a shot at consciousness. Right now, the level of consciousness they reach is infinitesimal: both the range of their inputs and the architecture of their memory stores are incapable of holding much of a model of the world (compared to us at least). More importantly, the refresh rate of their evaluation program, their “scanning” of the memory, is extremely low (I’m not talking about CPU cycles, but rather input-update-evaluate-act cycles, which in a game of minesweeper will happen perhaps 50 times? 50 moments of consciousness of a 10x10 grid of mines and safe spots is not a lot, but it’s not nothing). If all these shortcomings are addressed in the future, I’d bet money that these programs will report consciousness any time you ask.
Maybe I’m wrong for finding that answer “satisfying enough”, but it does the trick for me.
TL;DR: consciousness emerges because time exists as a continuous function updating the universe, as per the laws of physics (can’t help you with those though).
Honestly I think you're right—I shouldn't discount possibility #1 so much. I think that consciousness and feelings are so hard to explain that they justify unlikely-seeming possibilities. For example, my understanding is that the "microtubules theory" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orchestrated_objective_reduction) is a proposed idea of how consciousness could exist and could exert a kind of free at the quantum level. As far as I can tell this isn't a majority view, but really, I don't know enough about quantum physics to have the right to have an opinion.
Your arguments all start from the standpoint that consciousness and physical reality are of different and completely separate natures, which is why answer #1 talks about magical "little souls" which could not possibly be causally effective because (by definition) they are non-physical.
The best kind of naturalist answers that I've seen to this question is the idea that they are actually one and the same thing. Evolution created organisms with brains able to form enduring patterns of attraction / repulsion for classes of objects, because of obvious benefits, and since the world in which these organisms live is quite complex and changing, it also created a system of attention, i.e some kind of brain module that shuts most of the sensory input out most of the time, so that neural resources can be applied to one thing at a time. That is what we know as "paying attention", and we see even animals doing it. At least with higher animals like monkeys and apes, and probably most mammals, these is also an internal model of the world that is rich enough to include a representation of the individual itself within it (known in psychology as "self"). When you put these two together, you get the possibility to "pay attention to self", which has all the ingredients needed for the human individual to be able to say something like "I feel sad" in response to its own internal state after a loss. But then, if we've explained the ability to say the sentence, and in the absence of any intentional deception, we've also explained how the individual comes to "feel sadness" itself.
I think ideas in this area go by names like "embodied cognition". It's probably not 100% the same thing, but philosophers have elaborated theories called "neutral monism" which are also kind of in this area: what is really there is not what we know as matter or what we know as consciousness, but something prior to both.
Then of course there is panpsychism - consciousness came first, and pysicality just appears in it. There is an obvious tension with the mathematical regularity of science, but experientially it's unassailable.
And before we discount mind-body dualism entirely - the "detached, purely neutral observer" that N0st mentions as a problematic assumption is exactly what many advanced practitioners of meditation have reported!
"Answer 1" can be seen as dualism. "Answer 3" can (I think) be seen as your second paragraph or embodied cognition. "Answer 3" and "Answer 4" are also variants of panpsychism. (For what it's worth, I lean towards answer 4, but I wasn't trying to argue for any particular view.)
"It just happens in this answer that the 'this is good do more of this' pattern evolution programmed into your brain also manifest as 'a sentience experiencing pleasure'. That’s weird.'
INDEED IT IS.
I pasted your article into ChatGPT 4 and asked it to "Summarize" and then "Create a new explanation" and I think it elaborated a bit on your #4 with this one:
=====================
Explanation 5: Panpsychism and Evolutionary Interaction
In this explanation, we consider that consciousness and feelings are inherent properties of the universe, as suggested by panpsychism. According to panpsychism, all matter possesses some form of consciousness, albeit at different levels of complexity.
When evolution came into play, it didn't create consciousness or feelings but instead developed mechanisms for these inherent properties to interact with the physical world. In other words, evolution fine-tuned the connections between consciousness, feelings, and biological organisms, allowing the organisms to have experiences and respond accordingly.
As organisms became more complex, their consciousness and feelings also evolved, enabling them to adapt and survive in various environments. This process led to the development of sophisticated neural networks, such as the human brain, where consciousness and feelings could interact with cognitive processes in more intricate ways.
In this perspective, consciousness and feelings are not created by evolution or any external force but are natural properties of the universe that become more refined and interconnected through evolutionary processes. This explanation suggests that the relationship between consciousness, feelings, and evolution is one of mutual interaction and co-development rather than a one-way influence.
Wow, the ultimate cursed explanation of consciousness: Simultaneously embrace panpsychism _and_ dualism!
This is a good angle. My suspicion is that "consciousness" is mostly a muddled, confused term. It shares a lot of discursive properties with "elan vital", which seems suspicious. Showing the parallel with "feelings" like you do is a nice way to highlight that aspect—Does anyone really believe in something like panemotionism?
That said, operationalizations of consciousness are where the meaty discussions happen, IMO. I recently was reading an article (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy? Wikipedia?) that overviewed current testing methodologies for subquestions that intersect concepts like consciousness, awareness, perception, intentionality, etc. Wish I could find it again.
Consciousness (or "feelings") is a strange term in that on the one hand, it's quite rather hazy and hard to define. On the the other hand, one can argue that it's the singe thing that we can have the most confidence in being real ("cogito, ergo sum" and all that). I'm not sure, but I tend to think that it's best to treat consciousness as kind of an "atom" in our definition of the world, where it's impossible to define it in terms of other things.
Panemotionalism is a good word!
Even if it there's some primitive ontological feature of the universe that maps onto "consciousness", defeating attempts at reduction, that feature behaves and interacts with other features of the universe. Actually sitting down and trying to concretely operationalize those interactions, in my experience at least, has mostly ended up dissolving the "consciousness"-labeled node in my conceptual graph.
In terms of meta-discourse, I think that that "cogito, ergo sum" mostly functions as an appeal to intuition. Sure, I too have one or more Cartesian processes in my mind making assertions like, "I exist", "I am", etc, but it's an entirely different thing to try mapping those cognitive assertions onto other features of the world.
From a pure logical perspective, *cogito, ergo sum* kind of looks like it's begging the question. Expanded out a bit, "There is an I object that performs an action called 'thinking'; therefore, the I object exists."
Perhaps more interestingly, however, is that if you treat *cogito, ergo sum* as a process instead of an epistemic assertion, it turns into something more like "I think, therefore I am, which is a thought, therefore I am, which is a thought, therefore ..." ad infinitum. In other words, it behaves somewhat like a tight recursive loop, which is why it begs the question when rendered as a logical statement.
If you allow the above and agree that our intuitions about "being conscious" are epistemically confused, I think there's still a lot of room to ask about the phenomenology surrounding the Cartesian belief/intuition itself. Wildly speculating, if you think of the brain as a dynamical system with lots of feedback loops, it's not *entirely* surprising that you might end up in regimes where small degenerate feedback loops arise.
> If you allow the above and agree that our intuitions about "being conscious" are epistemically confused
Consciousness is an intuition that you'll have to take from my cold dead hands. 😅
Here's how I'd put it: If I were to say that rocks exist, few would criticize that statement as epistemically confused. But if you wanted to, wouldn't all the same criticisms people make about consciousness apply to it? What does it _really_ mean for rock to exist? Maybe we should just do away with that confused concept and talk about something else.
But I feel like this is an isolated demand for rigor. *All* of language is a chicken-and-egg tangle of words defined in terms of other words, with things only real grounding being the statistical patterns of how we see words being used. From that perspective, I feel like "consciousness" should be the concept with the *strongest* support, since we all experience it all the time, you know it's real even if you're living in a simulation and I'm fake, and all that.
> But if you wanted to, wouldn't all the same criticisms people make about consciousness apply to [rocks]?
Not at all! It's fairly straightforward to play Taboo™ with the word "rock" and operationalize the term into consensus reality-level procedures. They tend to be hard (Mohs ≥1 or whatever), usually found lying around in groups, typically have XYZ palette of colors, and all manner of properties found in your friendly minerology textbook.
I'm pretty sure your reductionist worldview easily admits rocks as non-ontologically primitive objects. ☺
More to the point though, I'm claiming that "all the same criticisms people make about consciousness" apply to *elan vital*. At the very least, I think that should throw in some negative log-likelihood that "consciousness" has coherent extrinsics.
> Consciousness is an intuition that you'll have to take from my cold dead hands.
Hehe. Don't get me wrong. I'm not making the stronger claim that we're all just confused p-zombies and the word "consciousness" is completely empty. The color red still appears red; however, even "redness" can be dissected into more primitive perceptive qualia if you meditate on it a bit. Rather, I'm claiming that "consciousness" vaguely gestures at a collection of phenomena which don't form a particularly cohesive whole in the same way that calling Roger Penrose + banana smell + writer's block "ballingrin" doesn't make it a coherent concept.
I am not subscribing to my own thought and will change my mind if I find other reasons, but this is what I am thinking as of today -
Perhaps consciousness is a perpetual engine that has a definitive (or not) timeline. We don’t exactly know if a child before its born has consciousness and when it comes outside the womb and breaths the hospital air that jumpstarts consciousness. Similarly when we die, where does all this awareness and sense of self and feeling go ?
It seems like some energy wave that’s abundantly available and all around us is able to jumpstart a engine called consciousness in matter that’s capable of perpetually holding on to this energy and taking on a creative direction and self evolve.
I don’t know if consciousness was intended to be this way, but we also don’t know if a lot of things were intended to how they are today in the universe.
Questions
1. If we find an alien race that’s conscious the parameters of our understanding of our own conciseness would change.
2. Does consciousness have any benefit ? Are there common benefits that we all gain from ?
3. Are your sense especially your eyes key to the concept consciousness ? What we can’t see, hear or touch impact how aware of those things ?
4. Why does when one sees something completely mind-blowing feel a sense of heightened consciousness/feeling ? The ups and down of consciousness state means it’s reactive to change or stimuli
5. When consciousness is aware of new things, does it mean the learning existed before and it was refreshed or it evolved to a new state completely like a new avatar. What happened to the old state of consciousness and where does it hide or does it vanish completely.
Bill Powers' Perceptual Control Theory (PCT) interprets all living systems as control systems. This is very different from regarding living systems as biochemical machines reacting to external stimuli as if they were billiard balls. Powers:
"Nearly all life scientists, particularly those who
try to achieve objectivity and uniform methodology,
have interpreted behavior as if it were caused by events
outside an organism acting on a mechanism that
merely responds. This hypothesis has become so in-
grained that it is considered to be a basic philosophical
principle of science. To explain behavior, one varies in-
dependent variables and records the ensuing actions;
to analyze the data, one assumes a causal link from
independent to dependent variable and calculates
a correlation or computes a transfer function. This
leads in turn to models of behaving systems in which
inputs are transformed by hypothetical processes into
motor outputs; those models lead to explorations of
inner processes (as in neurology and biochemistry)
predicated on the assumption that one is looking for
links in an input-output chain. One assumption leads
to the next until a whole structure has been built up,
one that governs our thinking at every level of analysis
from the genetic to the cognitive."
Instead of the billiard ball model, here is an example of how Powers interprets biochemistry,
"There are workers in biochemistry who are inves-
tigating feedback control processes. One significant
process involves an allosteric enzyme that is converted
into an active form by the effect of one substance, and
into an inactive form by the effect of another. When
these two substances have the same concentration,
the transition from active to inactive is balanced; the
slightest imbalance of the substances causes a highly
amplified offset toward the active or the inactive form.
In one example, the active form catalyzes a main reac-
tion, and the product of that reaction in turn enhances
the substance that converts the enzyme to the inactive
form—a closed-loop relationship. The feedback is
negative, because the active form of enzyme promotes
effects that lead to a strong shift toward the inactive
form. This little system very actively and accurately
forces the concentration of the product of the main
reaction to match the concentration of another
substance, the one that biases the enzyme toward
the active form. This allows one chemical system to
control the effects that another one is having on the
chemical environment.
A person without some training in recognizing
control processes might easily miss the fact that one
chemical concentration is accurately controlling the
product of a different reaction not directly related to
the controlling substance. The effect of this control
system is to create a relationship among concentra-
tions that is imposed by organization, not simply
by chemical laws. This is the kind of observation
that a reductionist is likely to overlook; reduction-
ism generally means failing to see the forest for the
trees. Even the workers who described this control
system mislabeled what it is doing—they concluded
that this system controls the outflow of the product,
when in fact it controls the concentration and makes
it dependent on a different and chemically-unrelated
substance."
http://www.livingcontrolsystems.com/intro_papers/crossroads.pdf
With PCT in place, human purpose and feelings have an engineering basis, consistent with physics, but based on the organizational control systems of the human organism (rather than responding to external stimuli as if we were billiard balls). Thus here is how he explains emotions,
"So-called emotional behavior is simply ordinary
behavior. However, strong feelings are involved
because the errors are considered very important,
so a small error produces a large output, and large
outputs call for strenuous action and a high degree
of physiological preparedness to support the action.
The technical term for this state is “high loop gain.”
In most circumstances the actions take place, the error
is corrected before it can become large, and the physi-
ological state returns to normal with no noticeable
emotional state being seen. But if the actions are not
allowed or if they fail to correct the error, the result is
a continued state of preparation that does not return
to normal, and the result is what we recognized as an
emotional state.
Therefore emotional behavior and emotional
thinking are simply ordinary behavior and think-
ing concerning subjects which are very important
to the person, so that strong actions will be used as
required to correct errors, and even small errors are
not tolerated. "
http://www.livingcontrolsystems.com/intro_papers/on_emotions.pdf
"Feelings" are how we experience the need for our control systems to correct error.
On top of Powers universal account of living things as control systems, in the case of human beings we have:
1. "Play" or "degrees of freedom" in our systems, most likely evolved because such experimentation allowed us to adapt to more diverse conditions;
2. Cognition that allows us to assess the expected value of various uncertain courses of action;
3. High stakes social status and coalitional decisions under uncertainty; and
4. Emotionally-laden symbolic cognitive processing through culturally defined symbols (whose meaning and coalitional salience are constantly shifting)
These four additional conditions have led to an internal landscape of experiences of feelings with far greater complexity than exist for feelings of warm, cold, pain, pleasure, hunger, etc.
Ultimately in the West (and now around much of the world) the combination of high stakes uncertainty in error correction in a soup of symbolic processing gave rise to individual self-consciousness (see Julian Jaynes for the key hypothesis, even if, as Daniel Dennett says, the details of his account happen to be wrong).
Personal identity (aka "consciousness") has become part of a control system with feelings associated with error correction signals. Our error correction mechanisms today are working on multiple levels of complexity and uncertainty. Conflicting feelings have become the norm rather than the exception among many WEIRD homo sapiens.
With respect to the relationship between consciousness and physics, consciousness is no more strange than feelings in Powers account (though the fact of consciousness is still remarkable, as are many evolved living systems).
Lots of Powers' content available here,
http://www.pctweb.org/bill/billpowers.html
His paper on the origins of purpose coinciding with the origins of life, via control systems accidentially coming into existence in the primordial soup billions of years ago, is especially fascinating,
http://www.livingcontrolsystems.com/intro_papers/evolution_purpose.pdf
https://qualiacomputing.com/ has some good stuff on this, and I suspect from personal experience meditating and other people's reports that the reason people think consciousness is non-causal is because pure consciousness without formed content (imagine knowing without an object to know in particular) is very close to an informationless state. However, consciousness is used for binding (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g0YID6XV-PQ&ab_channel=Andr%C3%A9sG%C3%B3mezEmilsson) which is quite computationally important and gives a reason for it to be recruited from the EM field (https://www.mdpi.com/2076-3417/7/12/1248) by natural selection.
Can you elaborate on your first sentence? I'm fascinated but not sure I can really grasp it.
I followed qualia computing for a year or two but I felt like I was missing some kind of foundational knowledge necessary to understand what was going on and never seemed to gain it by osmosis. Sometimes the posts would involve technical concepts (Hamiltonians, annealing, etc.) that I'm familiar with and that didn't much help, so I sort of gave up. Would love to understand what is happening there!
Sure! First off, representing any information in your experience requires some symmetry breaking because otherwise there's just no differentiation between anything and anything else. Particular objects like an apple require a lot of such breaks in order to differentiate red from every other color, construct the sense of space the apple is in and specify it as in a particular spot, construct the imagined inner visual field as distinct from the outer one, tile the apple with textures, etc. Now, there're also more subtle differentiations that happen, like the distinction between awareness/consciousness of the object, and the object itself. It's possible to take the distinction that's made there and instead of having a particular object you are conscious of consciousness of consciousness of... and so on. When done quite deeply, this state doesn't contain stuff like objects or understanding of cause and effect because the number of symmetry breaks and the degree of them is too large to be supported by the state. Instead, you get a ball of "pure" consciousness that feels like pure knowing with ~epsilon interference between one knowing and another. You can also kinda imagine it as every piece of your experience doing the AND operation, or (almost, if it was perfect they'd cancel entirely) perfectly reflective particles all reflecting each other. Beyond that, there are two main historically understood states with less symmetry breaks, which are nothing (everything does NOR/everything cancels out except for a super subtle wrapper to remember the cancellation) and "neither perception nor non-perception" (actually empty of information, including time differentiation, must infer the existence of it after the fact when you notice it's been 30 minutes since you started meditating and you thought it was more like two). Anyway, because there's so little information in the state itself and because most people have an approximation of pure consciousness from looking at what is conserved between their experiences in normal conditions, it naively seems like it wouldn't be able to do anything, but a lot of that is because people do not have access to states that largely change the quantity of consciousness (and are tracking that variable) in order to see effects, like nothing or well-done consciousness without content (that is, a really small epsilon). Also, it's difficult to reason about anyway because the effects of consciousness are embedded in whatever tools you are using to reason about consciousness because they're part of your experience, so attempting to compare imagined differences between consciousness and not during usual conditions will not (trivially) reveal the effects of consciousness.
Feel free to ask more questions, I love talking about this stuff. Unfortunately it's pretty esoteric rn and tricky to understand without having good references to it within your own experience. Hopefully we get to the point where the basics have been very clearly mathematized so we can talk about it precisely without having to personally experience really wild meditative stuff!
Thank you! I must ask... do you think it's possible to understand this without having enough corresponding first-hand meditation/psychedelic experiences? I'm sad to admit that from the first sentence I'm a bit confused about what symmetry breaking is happening. I'm also confused about the distinction between awareness of an object, and the object itself. In one sense this seems very obvious: "An object is molecules in the world, awareness is something I experience". But in another sense (probably the one you're getting at) it seems *extremely* subtle: "Objects don't really exist; the world is a buzzing idiotic evolution of the wavefunction; objects are an abstraction created by my brain to help me navigate in the world successfully." In the latter case, I do indeed have trouble understanding the difference, or how an "object" can "exist" without someone being conscious of it.
I am generally pretty optimistic on people being able to understand exotic states of consciousness without directly being in them much, so probably, though it may take a bit of explanatory work. The symmetry breaking I'm referring to here is pretty subtle (though it is in all experiences, fish in water type subtle), it's any difference between part of your experience and another part of it. This also includes stuff like perceiver and perceived and is/isn't, so it's fairly tricky to reason about the super general cases. Additionally, you're on the right track with the latter case! The subject and object in this sense can not exist wholly independent of each other and are created from the same source, and this does imply that to some degree subjects are objects and objects are subjects. Another way of getting to that result is that everything in experience to some degree is like a mirror and therefore is perceived as containing a bit of the mirrored. That said, an object doesn't necessarily have to be experienced as observed by a person in order to be differentiated from another piece of experience, though of course these experiences will be happening inside humans, and the usual modes of perception preclude stuff like a large degree of objects perceiving each other without an intermediary person in the experience (I do think that some degree of this happens normally for everyone, but typically very very subtle). This also makes it hard to do and remember, because memory systems are typically quite entangled with the usual sense of self, which I suspect is part of why super-advanced meditators sometimes report worse memory. I am very much looking for ways for that to not happen to me. Anyway, the "pure consciousness" state that I referred to previously is like taking the subject/object duality of a normal perception like you seeing an apple, removing the particular informational contents of the normal subject (you) and object (apple) so that you just have structure left, then letting both the subject and object in that structure be the structure itself. After that setup there are many options for exactly how the recursion and differentiation go, plus possible variation in the quantity/amplitude of experience in a particular bit of the structure. Eventually I'd like to get more precise for replicability, but that's a good first approximation. Also, I'm going to be making some really precise analogies in the structure and mechanics of consciousness and known physical and mathematical stuff at some point in the future, so even if the previous descriptions don't help a lot I expect that we'll be able to find a lot of common grounding without having to experience the stuff directly. One in particular that I am quite excited for is the holographic properties of experience; the mechanics of taking a reference beam, splitting, reflecting one beam off of an object, then recombining the beams on a plate are basically identical to what happens a lot of the time in experience, though what exactly the plate and object are made of and how they work is a bit different. There's also some stuff that works pretty much how optical tweezers do, that will be p cool too once I describe all of this stuff in a full-length and not off the cuff post or something. Hope this helps!
I think maybe these are both the same problem. What if feelings are just an internal representation of the reward circuitry, a way of our consciousness trying to "make sense" of what just happened that made us prefer eating more pizza in the future. Using that thinking, one can also perfectly rationalize himself into eating meat - animals have outward expressions (with some evolutionary purpose, sometimes even explicitly deceiving humans) that we mistake for feelings, but since they are "zombies" we don't have to care. Or maybe everything is conscious, just with varying degrees. But I think consciousness and feelings are fundamentally interlinked
Oh, definitely, I think they are very close, and arguably the same. I just find that personally, the "feelings" phrasing sharpens the "hardness" of the problem, as it makes the alignment between the reward function programmed into my brain and my subjective experiences more puzzling. (Why should those things be so similar?)
Hello, I would just like to point something that's really bothering me: the way you talk about evolution, like it has some kind of purpose. This is really not the case, and I feel describing it this way really is harming scientific thought.
"Evolution" as we can observe emerges from conjunction of two phenomena: mutations, and selective pressure. These are very dumb phenomena, and do not "know" or "want" anything - they are forces, just like gravity.
There are multiple consequences of this:
- there is not "good" or "bad" evolutions; this doesn't make sense. All there is are random mutations, and environment that kills individuals, creating selective pressure.
- it's not because a behaviour / phenomena emerges, that it has to be related to evolution. There are plenty of mutations that barely change the fitness function of a population (see genetic drift).
Of course, when I say "evolution wants you to reproduce your genes" this is a shorthand for something like "there has long been selective pressure such that organisms that were better able to reproduce their genes had more descendants". I trust readers (like you) understand this.