Interesting article didnt know where it fit best so I wanted to share it here.
Interesting but I struggle to see how this hypothesis could ever be proven or disproven. If it can’t actually be tested then I don’t see how it presents more scientific value any other religious or superstitious belief.
I’ve long been fond of panpsychism, but I think it’s less a hypothesis to be “proven” and more just a different way of framing the questions behind what consciousness is and how it can be defined. Under panpsychism consciousness isn’t a binary property that some things have and other things don’t, it’s a continuum from zero to one (and if you count humans as “1” on the consciousness scale it also makes sense to consider values above that - there’s no reason to assume that humans are the “most conscious possible” state of being).
So when you’re reading about panpsychism and it says something like “individual electrons are conscious”, bear in mind that they’re proposing considering electrons to be, like, 10^-10 “consciousness units” worth of conscious. It’s not like they’re actually aware of themselves in some meaningful way like humans are. That’s a common “giggle factor” problem for panpsychism. And it’s also not saying that any arbitrary larger-scale structure us “more conscious” than humans, the way that the components of a large-scale structure interact is super important. A rock is not equivalently as “conscious” as a human brain even if they have the same number of particles interacting within them.
I think the real issue is with the fact that consciousness is not particularly well defined. Something can be more or less conscious than something else but what precisely does that mean? Has there ever been a means of measuring or detecting consciousness in anything?
That’s my biggest frustration with this debate. At this point I’m convinced that consciousness is only a construct. Not a tangible entity, process, or concept, just a useful way to describe behavior. If someone describes the universe as conscious that’s neat and all, but it doesn’t really mean anything yet. And another person could say it isn’t and neither would be right or wrong, because what the hell is consciousness? Like you said, how are we supposed to measure this when we don’t know what it is? Many people think we haven’t discovered what consciousness is; I believe we haven’t decided what it is.
Depends on who you ask I think. Emergentism makes more sense to me because if you take consciousness as humans experience it, make it derivative of material structure (neurological activity), and assume the appearance of some kind of uniformity as synthesis of different parts of that neurological system, the only way consciousness may exist in that framing is in organisms that posses a nervous system.
This does inevitably leads to the problem of where to draw the line on the complexity necessary to qualify as consciousness, and im.not gonna pretend like I have the answer to that, but at least it becomes more of a scientific question rather than purely philosophical I think.
You could define it that way. I think it could be more abstract than that, personally, because
a. Is the nervous system in animals the only neural network in nature? I’ve heard discussion on the whether a some types of fungus are conscious from how they send chemical signals to other parts of the fungus. This is slow but does it count? And then there’s the collective consciousness of ant colonies and beehives. That’s a level above where each bug’s nervous system is itself a node in a larger neural network.
b. I think that consciousness is more than just the nervous system. In another comment under this post I argued that a neural network (in an abstract sense) can only “think” in terms of the sensors it has access too. What does the lab-grown brain think about? It’s never seen things, it’s never heard sounds or words, can it feel touch? (I’m not an anatomy guy). My hunch is it’s just static, essentially an “untrained” neural network". Does that count as conscious?Maybe those senses are considered a part of the nervous system, again I’m not an anatomy guy.
But then how do the “chemical computations” like hormones and gut bacteria come into play? Are they just indirectly sensed by the nervous system?
I’m really not exactly sure what qualifies, but the existence of an emergent system so has to be there. Does fungus communication give rise to a system that can build some kind of memory and refer to it to develop more complex behavior? If not, then it’s lacking the level of complexity to be considered consciousness. (But that’s just where I personally draw the line)
Eusociality has its own context. It’s possible for a hive to show complex organized behavior, but so would an infinite paperclip machine if it was to consist of a swarm of collector drones. A myriad of units with a set of pre-determined instructions can have complex organizations, which still wouldn’t qualify as consciousness.
Now, the brain scenario would definitely count since it consists of the necessary “hardware” to start generating its own abstract contextual model of its experiences.
A myriad of units with a set of pre-determined instructions
Like neurons? My argument was that in abstract sense, a single ant could be considered a neuron. It senses the environment and other ants for inputs, and it interacts with the environment and other ants for output. A network of ants is capable of complex behavior. By this logic of course, just about any entity could be considered a neuron, and any collection of entities a neural network, which I think is what the original article is getting at. Now is the ant colony conscious? I don’t know. Am I conscious? I think so, it seems like it. Are you conscious? You seem a lot like me, and I think I probably am, so I think you probably are too. Basically what I’m saying is I haven’t heard of a definition of consciousness that doesn’t wind up encapsulating everything or nothing, or that isn’t human-centric.
Now, the brain scenario would definitely count since it consists of the necessary “hardware” to start generating its own abstract contextual model of its experiences.
So, you’re saying that you don’t need experience to be conscious, just the the potential to experience? I’m not sure if I agree with that. Yeah there’s diminishing returns, I don’t think that an old person is significantly more self-aware than a kid in the grand scheme of things, but pretty much every thought I’ve ever had, that I realized I had anyway, was in terms of a sense I had, or at least derived from the senses. Even a newborn has been feeling and hearing since embryo. Now there is instinct to consider, that was evolved and while it can influence and direct consciousness, I don’t think acting on instinct is a conscious act itself. I’m saying, can a brain in a jar with no contact with the world, that’s never had contact with the world at any point, be aware of itself? What is self without environment?
I prefer to consider it in terms of “dimensions of awareness”. Humans have evolved hundreds, possibly thousands, of interlinked dimensions of awareness for just about everything from colors to body language. Simple automated systems with sensors have their own dimensions of awareness, from vision to heat to pressure. Whatever it is that they track and respond to. AI, however, is finally hitting the point where these dimensions of awareness are being stacked and linked together (GPT5 can see, hear, read, and respond) and it’s only a matter of time and agency (aka executive functioning) before we see true AI consciousness.
I had a similar thought recently actually, that consciousness is more than the brain. Is gt4 conscious? Eh, I don’t believe anyone knows what that means but is it comparable to human consciousness? I don’t think so, but how could it be? It senses words, so it knows words, so it speaks words.
I hear it said all the time that llm’s don’t really understand what they’re talking about, but they seem to understand as well as they can given the dimensions they are aware of, using your terminology. I mean how can I describe anything myself without sensory details? It sounds like. It looks like. It feels like. It behaves like. We got all that knowledge by sensing, then infering. There’s no special sauce that creates understanding from nothing.
I don’t have any links but imo the experiences of people who were born without a sense, and especially those who were later able to gain it back, strongly supports this idea that something can only be conceptualized in the terms that it was sensed in.
Well, hypothetically, if someone defined the “consciousness” of every particle mathematically, and then figured out the laws that would allow us to compute (or at least approximate) the “consciousness” of a composite system (such as a brain), then we’d would have a genuine scientific theory.
As I see it, people keep developing mental constructs to make the experience of their own existence feel more meaningful, more important and potencially eternal, because the thought of insignificance and eventual death is just too scary.
For me, this is less an emotional support philosophy, and more an earnest curiosity about the nature of consciousness and reality.
For all the words we can use on it, it’s lost on people who never had thoughts and experiences that prompted them to be curious about the nature of consciousness and reality.
It’s like discussing the
bitternesssourness of a lemon with someone who never tried one.
But on the other hand: have you tried psychedelics?
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it’s all a hallucination
It amazes me how many people will take the specialness of their experience as a given, even when thinking about the big picture is literally their job.
And I’ll be dammed if I ever stop!! The thought of this is the only go you get and after that eternal darkness, that shit keeps me awake at night.
I don’t think “eternal darkness” is a good descriptor. Was there “eternal darkness” before you were born?
not the person you’re replying to, but I was too young to remember
And you’ll be too old to remember the eternal darkness once you’re dead.
People love to repeat this but it’s not as comforting as you think it is.
I didn’t repeat the comment you replied to, it was my original thought.
You might not find it comforting, but plenty of people do.
Why not?
Why does philosophy constantly twist things into an over complicated mythical mess, and then act like it’s some novel insight? Like the things with colors: they only exist subjectively so they aren’t real in any other sense than being observed, so it’s only the observation that makes them real, and does that mean they are even real???
Yes, they are. Subatomic particles vibrate (or absorb vibrations) at specific frequencies, and therefor emit electromagnetic waves at certain frequencies when stimulated. That is real and objective. Evolution has left us with sensors and neurons that can detect and interpret some of these frequencies that appear to us as colors. That is subjective, but the science behind it is not. That’s what happens. Is the color real? Well, define the question better and there is an actual answer. The vibrations are real. Your interpretation is also real, but in a different way. Does the color exist without an observer? Well, what’s your definition of color? Does a tree falling in the woods with nothing to hear it make a sound? Well, what’s your definition of a sound?
The argument is not that they don’t exist.
A color is an example that not all perceived can be described using terms of the physical world, and has variables that can only be experienced rather than described
Red is light at the 480 THz range. Blue is light at the 670 THz range. I think that’s perfectly described using terms of the physical world. If you’re talking about “what we experience as color” as being difficult to describe in our consciousness, then sure but that’s the case for every single thing we experience. Same way I can describe the musical note A as 440 Hz. Does an A to you sound the same to me? My tongue is sensing a sugar molecule, does the experience of tasting it feel the same to you?
Not a single human perception can be described in words, but we can all compare perceptions to other perceptions and agree on the same answer. Perceptions are simply us recognizing patterns in our environment. Red is me recognizing my eyeball is looking at an object reflecting light in the 480 THz range. You look at that red ball and you also recognize it as reflecting light at 480 THz. Does it need to be described any further?
It all exists in some capacity. Color is either the electromagnetic frequency emitted by particles when stimulated by radiation, or it is the electrochemical signals firing through your brain which process an image based on the way cells in your eyes absorb those frequencies. Or, more precisely I suppose, the intersection of both is where “color” exists, as one cannot occur without the other.
Another aspect of this conversation was what was posited by the Sapir Whorf Hypothesis. The experiential differences in perception of color can also be attributed to differences in culture / upbringing which influenced one’s processing of the stimuli itself. I tend to oversimplify it to the firmware analogy. Sometimes you get raw input and the languages provide different libraries for comtextualizing this input.
Why does philosophy constantly twist things into an over complicated mythical mess, and then act like it’s some novel insight?
I cannot stand that either, but this sort of pseudo-profundity is more common in some specific schools of thought, rather than philosophy in general.
Does a tree falling in the woods with nothing to hear it make a sound?
It’s probably № 1 on my list of stupidest questions. The answer is yes.
Ah, but is a pressure wave propagating through air truly a sound if it does not interact with something that can hear? Or is it just the movement of air???
LoL, I’m sorry I couldn’t help myself.
I mean, it’s a pretty settled question, but I don’t know if I’d say “stupid”. How do you prove something you cannot ever measure exists? I think there’s rough agreement that you can at least be very confident the sound does, although how exactly varies by school of thought.
Not sure if I understood you correctly, but in that case you cannot measure the tree falling and therefore you would not be able to even ask or think of that question.
So that’s a point against it existing, but maybe you find the fallen tree later and ask if it was loud when it fell. Most people would agree a tree works the exact same way watched or not, though. There’s different justifications why. Some people would say ontological momentum; I’d point to Occam’s razor, which can be mathematically derived from Solomonoff calculus, and the laws of physics we have which can fit on a pamphlet and are supposed to apply anywhere at any time.
I love this, it’s an emotionally regulated rant that’s so eloquently written that it’s more intelligent and informative than the article in question.
Only if you stopped reading after the first paragraph and that’s a position held by Galileo which, as comes immediately after, is outdated.
I suppose what it is is that smaller questions are answered, bringing along with these answers jargon and special terms, then these special terms are used to define greater special terms, and so on until you end up with a big twisty answer to a seemingly simple question, and people who haven’t read the answers with the smaller special terms look at the twisty answer in understandable bemusement.
Edit: This also happens to be one of life’s big unanswered questions. I had an assignment on it for my MPhil a couple of years ago.
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It does seems like philosophers do that sometimes, but how do you know there’s electromagnetic radiation in the first place? You can’t sense it unless if happens to vibrate in a narrow frequency range and even then only imperfectly. So, there’s also really necessary philosophy. I guess it’s just hard to objectively separate the quality stuff from the wankery.
Now I just know this article is wrong:
“But explaining things that reside “only in consciousness”—the red of a sunset, say, or the bitter taste of a lemon—has proven far more difficult”
Lemons are sour, damn it, not bitter! Lemons are part of the universe and sour, so any consciousness that perceives them as bitter is not part of the universe. /s
It’s simply irrelevant. If you believe this theory exactly nothing changes about what you can predict about the world. That’s what knowledge is all about. If you have a theory that doesn’t behave differently under some different circumstances, you’ve essentially said nothing.
Also reminds me a bit of the chapter in “Surely you’re joking, Mr. Feynman!” called “Is Electricity Fire?”, if someone knows that.
Consider math, it doesn’t make any empirical predictions on its own, as it is just a set of abstract symbols and rules. Do you consider mathematical facts to be a form of knowledge?
Maths and reality are different. Very different. Reality can be explored empirically while maths is logic not empirical. We can never say we are 100% sure about the rules/laws we have discovered about our reality, but we can say for sure that a maths theorem is true or false.
Maths is a set of self-consistent tools that can be used to predict what happens in reality. The mathematical description of reality is an estimate, contains countless assumptions and inaccuracies about where things are and what properties they have. In fact in quantum physics, we literally can’t know momentum and location at the same time.
Maths can describe (or I should say, approximate) realities that don’t exist.
Because maths and reality are different domains, we can know different things about them using different approaches.
In fact in quantum physics, we literally can’t know momentum and location at the same time.
I mean, we can know a precise wavefunction, though. It seems highly likely to me personally that physics is mathematical and we’ve just kind of absorbed it in the process of evolving intelligence.
Arguably “it’s impossible to violate energy conservation given time-invariant action” is an empirical prediction, and that’s a specific case of Noether’s theorem.
There’s nothing wrong with speculation as long as everyone knows that’s what going on.
Take the work of Julian Jaynes for example; it’s fringe, it’s speculative, but he’s asking questions that nobody else asked before and that in itself is worthwhile because it can pave the way for better questions which are falsifiable.
Yeah, this isn’t really a theory yet. That doesn’t necessarily mean it’s an invalid concept, though. For example, if game theory turned up in fundamental physics somehow, wouldn’t that suggest intelligence might be more fundamental than we assumed?
What else would be then? Whatever happens is part of the universe development. We are the universe being conscious of itself. We think we are something else apart, or self made…
No.
I actually just made a community for when you don’t know where to post something.
Life creates it, makes it grow. Its energy surrounds us and binds us. Luminous beings are we, not this crude matter. You must feel the Force around you; here, between you, me, the tree, the rock, everywhere, yes. Even between the land and the ship.
“The universe danced towards life. Life was a remarkably common commodity. Anything sufficiently complicated seemed to get cut in for some, in the same way that anything massive enough got a generous helping of gravity. The universe had a definite tendency towards awareness. This suggested a certain subtle cruelty woven into the very fabric of space-time.”
- Terry Pratchett, Soul Music
No, consciousness is just what it feels like when a meat brain uses its meat to change its focus of attention; which gives rise to beliefs (some of them even true!) about a meat brain having a self.
It takes time, because brains are made of meat, and meat is slow.
It’s leaky, because brains are made of meat, and meat oozes.
It generates the image of a “self” because brains are in meat bodies and actually do have physical continuity rather than being disconnected instants of computation; a term for “I, me, myself” is a rough model of the existence of brain features like memory, meat features like hormones, and even ape social-behavior features.
Attention/awareness is leaky and takes time; meat pumps rhythmically; and chemicals stick around.
And the meat brain can notice its own meaty doings. Just as it builds models of the outside world, it builds models of itself, with thoughts like “I am in the middle of doing an action” or “I am impatient” or “I feel sleepy” or “OW, LEG CRAMPS SUCK!” That is, its attention can range over not only the leg cramp itself, but its own reaction to having a leg cramp, including how the existence of leg cramps fits into its larger model of whether the world is a terrible place.
It usually comes up with a lot of correct beliefs out of this reflection, like “this is my leg, not your leg” and “I know English” and “Wow, I am distractable this morning, maybe it’s the strong coffee”. But it also comes up with dubious beliefs like “I am an eternal soul”, “I am fully continuous in time”, or “Oh God, what sin did I commit to deserve this leg cramp?”
(“This is my leg, not yours” is important because there’s nothing anyone can do to your leg that will make my leg cramp go away. The “self/other” distinction is important to consciousness because it has real-world implications; bodies really are physically disconnected from one another, which is why depersonalization can be an unhealthy thing for a consciousness to do too much.)
There’s no reason to believe ChatGPT or the like are conscious, because they don’t have the properties that consciousness is a model of. They’re not fed information about their own well-being or place in the world. They don’t observe their own processing. They do run largely as disconnected instants of computation. They don’t live in a space where having a sense of “self/other” is effective.
(Not yet, anyway. There are folks out there trying to build AI systems that do have the feedback loops that might generate something like consciousness. This is probably a bad idea, and may even be an evil one.)
I like your reasoning very much, really well said!
The question is if consciousness only exist on this level.
We know that ant hives have a hivemind that is not present in the individual ant. Similarly humans can also be observed to create a zeitgeist on larger than the individual scale. Even individual humans pass through different states of consciousness from birth to death. So it very much seems that consciousness is scalable. So where are we on that scale, can it be scaled down as well as up?
Most things in the universe have recursive properties. They can be scaled up and down or be understood as the sum of their parts. Saying that consciousness is an emergent property is no different, but it’s sort of dodging the question just as badly as someone saying it’s a magical new law of nature.
Perhaps AI can help us determine what the minimum number of required parts to create the emergent property is and why it isn’t present in the same setup with just one less part, or with a different complexity. I doubt we’ll find the answer, but it might lead to some better questions.
No.
Conciousness is just an emergent property of the multiple parts of the brain trying to interpret and respond to its surroundings.
Edit: I stand by what I said, but you all don’t need to be so mean and vile about it…
Wow. I’m glad you figured that out. I thought it was going to be so much more difficult.
It’s ok if you disagree! What do you think it is?
it is not about disagreeing. It is your certainty and absolutism on matters that are in no way certain or absolute
First, I appreciate your calm response in the context of my sarcasm. It’s not what I’m used to on the Internet, and it’s refreshing.
My simplest answer is that I don’t know. Neuroscience has made a lot of progress in the last several decades, but I’m unaware of any credible researchers claiming to have a unified theory of consciousness yet. We probably still have a long way to go, assuming it’s even possible to know.
That sounds like a swell, materialist solution, but it just kicks the can down the metaphysical road and creates more questions than it answers. What parts of the brain interact to create it? What is the subjective experience “made” of? Some kind of energy? How much complexity is required for it to emerge? Are there levels of consciousness? Are babies born with a consciousness that grows more robust over time, or does it pop in at some discrete level? Does the galaxy have an emergent consciousness, it’s certainly more complex than the human brain. What about the universe?
Even if “it’s an emergent property” is true, it’s not a very useful answer. It’s like saying babies come from the hospital, it skips over the part we’re asking the question about.
Panpsychism is probably the most scientifically conservative explanation of consciousness. “Energy fields permeating the universe and interacting with each other” is the model scientists use to explain many, many phenomena, from electromagnetism to mass.
We don’t have all the answers yet but we’re making progress in finding them.
All the evidence so far seems to indicate that consciousness is a purely physical phenomenon … despite the fact that it may not seem so to us
is just
My favorite response for this is ‘point to your mind.’
My mean response is ‘notexecutive@shi.itjust.works is just a random user name with some words attached and no person actually exists behind it.’
Another response could be “A car is just some wheels and an engine.”
Sure would be fun to watch someone try and drive some wheels and an engine.
The point of emerging systems is that they tend to be more than just a sum of their parts:
In One Piece the main characters name is Luffy.
Do you need to be so needlessly rude?
Is ‘your’ interpretation of things the only one that exists?
No one’s been rude though, I don’t know what you’re considering “rude” or “vile”
The default response I get most of the time I comment on things is along the lines of “You shouldn’t have thoughts or opinions and because you shared them I’m going to get as many other users to attack you as possible.”
Thought this might be different considering the context of this post, but here we are. You’re getting downvoted as much as you are upvoted for pointing out that someone is trying to manipulate the context to attack me. No responses either because if they aren’t actually bots they seem to have trouble coming up with any kind of understandable explanation for their behavior.
It’s like being in traffic and getting flicked off by the person that cut you off… when there was no one behind you…
If it’s just the universe, what would the universe want to experience? Should everybody live comfortably and kind of predictably or would the universe want to experience the maximally possible variance in life?
