Consciousness: freaky shit or nbd

need something between can't remotely be accounted for and nbd, going with fascinating new theory

i hope it's weird shit but i'm afraid it may turn out to be nbd

what I want to know is, if that exact combo of nuerons were to reappear somehow, would I be two people at once

uncomfortable and terrifying

not sure if I believe in it completely

whatever "you" is it isn't just a configuration of undifferentiated neurones

consciousness is an "I" we all share, maaaaan, you are your circumstances

its cool to think that we wouldn't exist if not for that one in a trillion chance that our sperm actually winds up making it to the goal line. we're all winners

Answer one is equiv of: ME! ME! ME! WONDERFUL ME!

Answer two is equiv of: I am Eeyore.

I'll go for number three.

Should've guessed everyone on here will have their own 'fascinating' theory.

haven't seen a fascinating theory yet? isn't the "truth" basically "we understand quite a lot but the big picture might be elusive for a while yet?"

Can a consciousness understand how that consciousness works? I think we'll need to build another one to understand it for us.

i vote weird shit given that the universe as a whole is kinda "weird shit" as far as I am concerned.

stuart kauffman has a pretty "fascinating" and totally weird theory about it being something like a "quantum state" (going from memory here) in which, like a kind of boundary line, consciousness is the liminal state that actualizes the possible. or the interface or membrane of a negentropic system--something that arranges the universe into analytic facts sort of "after the fact" of their unaccountable "thereness." or something.

and here's a great place for one of my favorite quotes, from George Spencer-Brown:

But in order to do so, evidently it must first cut itself up into at least one state which sees, and at least one other state which is seen. In this severed and mutilated condition, whatever it sees is only partially itself. We may take it that the world undoubtedly is itself (i.e. is indistinct from itself), but, in any attempt to see itself as an object, it must, equally undoubtedly, act so as to make itself distinct from, and therefore false to, itself. In this condition it will always partially elude itself.

ah sorry i cut off first part of that:

Thus we cannot escape the fact that the world we know is constructed in order (and thus in such a way as to be able) to see itself.

This is indeed amazing.

Not so much in view of what it sees, although this may appear fantastic enough, but in respect of the fact that it can see at all.

who was that dude that took acid and thought he was a rare species of lizard? then he started rattling off previously unknown facts about said lizard?

oh that was me

also I was reading an essay by Anthony Wilden on "analog" vs. "digital" communication yesterday and it occurs to me that part of the issue is that it's impossible to translate one into the other--actual consciousness sort of becomes the analog "environment" or excluded condition of digital communication about it (language, science, logic, etc). therefore "distinct from, and false to" the very phenomenon being discussed.

i think that other thread could be a good thread where scientists talk about how (some of them anyway) hold some non-scientific convictions they have based on higher intuitions but i'm getting kinda fatigued with the *big brains* trying to explain things i already know

this seems like a false dichotomy...

how do we not have a bunch of images with pot leaves on them in this thread by now, is what I'm saying

consciousness is no big deal to me. It's awareness that has always given me fits.

Niklas Luhmann has another one on this that I like a lot:

“If we were to make an effort to really observe our own consciousness in its operations from thought to thought, we would certainly discover a peculiar fascination with language, but also the noncommunicative, purely internal use of linguistic symbols and a peculiar, background depth of the actuality of consciousness, a depth on which words swim like ships chained in a row but without being consciousness itself, somehow illuminated, but not light itself”

voting weird shit

Nbd

The Krisna Consciousness people in my neighborhood would def vote 3, and I have seen them getting down to some epic ragas lately so I'm going wherever they're going.

Consciousness being weird shit isn't precluded by it being a bunch of neurons. It's weird shit caused by a bunch of neurons.

"caused by" doing an awful lot of work there.

but i'm not going over all this again!

my 'fascinating' new theory nicked from a bunch of ppl is that it's a curious causally effective epiphenomenon. so, weird shit.

rad quotes, ryan!
but please double check that you are not cutting off any of the text from now on, i got slightly headachy staring at a quote that began Thus before scrolling down to work it out.

http://i3.photobucket.com/albums/y55/silverbeam/A%20CSM%20Blog/epee.jpg

l to r: language, consciousness, mind

epee phenomenon

yep

nbd, had to happen somehow if it exists.

Fail to see eeyore connection tbh

More quotes, pls, ryan

No pithy quotes but two of the great papers in the 'freaky shit' school are pretty short and easy to read.

Thomas Nagel, What is it Like to be a Bat: http://evans-experientialism.freewebspace.com/nagel.htm
David Chalmers, Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness: http://consc.net/papers/facing.html

I haven't found any similarly digestible papers from the 'ndb' school yet but here's a page on master consciousness-denier Dennett:
http://www.consciousentities.com/?page_id=322

i'm a Dennett stan and am quite happy with the "echoes of pre-formed decisions theory", thoroughgoing materialism is happily consistent in a way that metaphysics can't hope to reach

iirc you're a pretty aggro anti-theist ledge? not sure how that sits with wishful magic consciousness? no snark, just saying the logical answer is anti freaky shit

Not freaky at all, I love consciousness. What a gift. Damn.

Putting the talk of magic to one side, I think consciousness is completely natural, it's just of a natural kind that current science is completely incapable of dealing with. My argument for this is from direct personal experience. I know that I'm aware, that I have experiences, they are subjective & phenomenological, and they can't be reduced to an objective, materialist description. That's all covered by the two papers above. Yes I'm an aggressive die-hard atheist but to anticipate one possible objection, there's no analogy between what I've just said and someone saying they have direct personal experience of God. The latter is a particular instance of experience that is peculiar, far from universal, and potentially illusory (in terms of what it represents). My argument is from experience itself which is universal (assuming solipsism is false) and incontrovertible. It doesn't make logical sense to say all experience is illusory - an illusion is still an experience!

fair enough and i wdn't - can't - refute what you say but you realise a believer could equally claim their experience of belief is real and very far from singular yeah?

plus i'm not sure how you can argue that the experience of consciousness can't be accounted for directly by material causes?

dennett is a big fan of nagel and nozick and borges and freaky shit fyi

I don't think the believer's argument works because they're arguing about the reference of their experience. I don't deny their experience, but it doesn't represent what they think it does. Any individual experience can be illusory, but experience itself can't.

Have you been reading Fear of death.? I don't wanna go over all that again, it just seems self evident to me that subjective phenomenological experience cannot be captured by an objective materialist description. cf. Nagel's bats, Frank Jackson's Mary the Neuroscientist, etc etc.

I think therefore ILX

it's because the meaning of "accounted for" is extremely vague

xxxp

me too - i don't think a materialist accounting of consciousness is less freaky than others, in the same way that i don't think a determinist accounting of existence is less freaky than free will. Borges strikes me as pretty deterministic in partic. and Nozick is my favourite libertarian.

i been avoiding fear of death because altho the turn it's taken has been right up my alley i'm terribly affeared of death

also ok i can see that you can argue with the objective conclusions that the believer wants to draw from their experience. in fact that seems like the only objection you can draw, to me. the experience itself is difficult to refute, which is why most theism post enlightenment has retreated into subjectivism and given up the pre-enlightenment ontological bollocks.

it's interesting to hear about your area of study tbh. i know that when big britches types run amok over what i do, or borrow terms and such because they're hip (it's a humanities area after all) without ever having processed a box of papers, i roll my eyes.

physics explaining consciousness is a moot point for me anyway. "just enjoy the mystery" hp otm. it's a religious / metaphysical phenomenon to me so whatever. neuroscience seems pretty cool though.

It sure is interesting; in many ways the biggest challenge is dealing with people in other fields (e.g. education) or influencer-type “thought leaders” co-opting its terminology to try to science-ify their anecdotes, opinions and theories. Plasticity is an important fundamental of what nervous systems do, but “neuroplasticity” is used to sell all manner of bullshit and pseudoscience thanks to Norman Doidge popularising it. And whenever I see “dopamine hit” I generally have to close the window and take a break. The worst aspect is that it’s poisoned perfectly good observations from psychology, social sciences etc because people feel the need to “neurovalidate” them (misleadingly). This week I had a student try to tell me that movement based therapy was effective because it “engages the mirror neuron system” and when I gently pointed out that there’s nowhere near enough evidence to link cellular substrates to behaviour level observations, they pointed me to literature where people indeed make such ludicrous claims, based on false claims about functional MRI, which itself is shaky as fuck and should be taken with a sack of salt. It’s … tiring.

I guess he uses the word "relativism" somehow to allude to relativity in physics?

Yes, consciousness is relative to the observer like motion is relative in galilean relativity or acceleration/gravitation in general relativity. I can observe my consciousness within my system but can't observe yours from the outside. He brings in emergence & equivalence, has criteria for a system to be conscious and even what the variables are within the system that correspond to perceptual experience. I think it's well argued and a novel idea, and he is asking for help from neuroscience and other fields to make it into a testable theory.

Its main thrust is explaining the private and subjective nature of consciousness, it by no means tries to explain the full what or why. There's still plenty of mystery to enjoy!

also sorry if this is a controversial take mattkkk but I don't think neuroscientists can have a monopoly on the hard problem!

No not at all, I am usually more open minded but it’s been pressing my buttons a little lately. I just returned to academia after two years of burnout and I’m frankly reeling at the mass uptake of genAI, particularly by students, which feels like the death of effort and independent thinking. Really unsettling, like everything I’ve tried to grapple with is now ehhh, shrug.

Spent some time with the Lahav video and also went to read some of his original paper, I think I get at least the outlines of his argument. Parts of it seem sort of obvious — each experience of consciousness is relative to the conditions of the person/being experiencing them, two people side by side in the same place experiencing all the same sensory/neural inputs, maybe eating the same chocolate bars and listening to the same piece of music on earbuds, are still having qualitatively different conscious experiences. Each could describe those experiences to one degree or another, but there's no outside way of measuring or replicating them. Neither is more "real" than the other.

It seems to me part of the challenge of the Hard Problem is even defining what it's trying to solve. The Cartesian concept of consciousness has been useful to us in thinking about ourselves and our experiences of the world, but it's still just a metaphor, it doesn't really establish "consciousness" as a discrete or measurable phenomenon. I got into complexity and emergence theories when there was that whole burst of pop-science books and articles about them in the '90s, and (again to the limited degree that I grasp them) they made a sort of intuitive sense to me, particularly as applied to consciousness — though don't ask me to define "intuitive" lol, another metaphor. I've never been religious and don't have any vested attachment to the idea of a soul or spirit, so the idea of self-awareness or consciousness emerging as a property of evolutionarily accumulated layers of information, inputs and neural density has an elegance I find appealing. It's not purely mechanistic, it doesn't reduce "me" to a formula, but it allows the creation of "me" from what are still "physical phenomena" intersecting and overlapping in incredibly complex ways.

As a cat lover, I spend a lot of time contemplating the lives of cats. They're so well adapted to the systems they inhabit, they display many different kinds of intelligence — reasoning, learning, emotional response — and we tend to anthropomorphize them as we do with other animals and even plants. I can easily ascribe some of my cat's behaviors to an assumed level of self-awareness, but of course I have no idea what that experience of self-awareness is like for him. Most forms of life demonstrate at least situational awareness, they respond to their environments in various physical/biochemical ways, and it seems most likely to me that our own experiences of the world are more on a continuum with those than they are something separate or apart from them. Just because a cockroach doesn't have — or need — the same level of what we call "self-awareness" that I do doesn't mean that it doesn't have some form of it — just the form that's most useful to it.

One thing that strikes me about human consciousness is that while it clearly has had evolutionary value from a species-wide perspective — look at us literally conquering our rock in space — it can also be really challenging and damaging at the individual level. Many (all?) animals can experience mental illness, to the degree that it's produced by a combination of biochemical dysfunctions and/or learned trauma, but it seems likely to me that acute self-awareness makes the experience of mental illness much worse. I know people who struggle to get through their days because they wake up experiencing already the dread of things to come (having to shower, look at themselves in the mirror, engage with other people) that are going to be challenging for them. I don't know that a cat with mental illness operates at quite that level of self-loathing? Impossible to say, obviously. But the idea of "self-loathing" itself is entirely a product of what we call consciousness, it can't exist outside it, and at that level consciousness hardly seems like a cost-free evolutionary benefit.

Parts of it seem sort of obvious — each experience of consciousness is relative to the conditions of the person/being experiencing them

I guess part of the motivation is to put this on a physical footing, even if just analogously? Against the Dennetts who would say science cannot see your consciousness so it's an illusion, making the analogy with a frame of reference that can't perceive motion, or distinguish between acceleration and gravity.

It’s been a while since I read Dennett, but my recollection of him (and maybe I’m just making him agree with me in my head) is that he wasn’t so much saying consciousness doesn’t exist as that it doesn’t exist separate from physical systems that form/inform it.

OK well denying qualia or anything non physical, the stuff that makes the hard problem hard and consciousness mysterious and magical.

I suppose. I don’t personally think of it quite like that. I think it’s more locating the magic as arising within the physical structures rather than outside or beyond them. Whatever our consciousness is needs our bodies to exist, at least in the form we know it. What if the bodies are kind of the factory, rather than just being inhabited vessels?

Absolutely agree. The problem for science folk is that the founders of our current science paradigm deliberately excluded subjective experience from the range of permissible evidence so we don’t even have a way to ask the necessary questions. It’s a useful restriction for many applications but can’t address this issue so we are left with speculation dressed as conjecture.

dennett is famous for denying qualia, no? my dad might have a copy of his book, if so maybe I'll give it a hate read.

Yeah he doesn’t think qualia is/are a useful concept. (Can you really “believe” or disbelieve in qualia? It’s just another metaphor.) Dennett definitely is on the side of consciousness being “created” through a complex series of physical/biochemical processes. But to me, that’s not a reductive or exactly mechanistic model. The whole idea of “emergence” (another metaphor obviously) is that properties can arise that are essentially more than the sum of their parts.

Can you really “believe” or disbelieve in qualia? It’s just another metaphor

Belief or disbelief seems like a category mistake because I cannot conceive of disbelieving in them. They're like the opposite of a metaphor, they're foundational. They don't need evidence to support them, they are evidence of themselves.

Not as such? We certainly have conscious experiences, or experiences that we call consciousness, but that doesn’t make them any one thing, or verify the “existence” of a word we created a couple hundred years ago.

"Relativistic Theory" video fails at the first hurdle for me for assuming that the brain's "state" is measurable; it isn't, as decades of big neuroscience projects have painfully demonstrated at scales far cruder than the argument is describing. The phenomenon of destructive measurement should be pretty familiar to a physicist conversant with quantum theory. In neuroscience we get a spectrum of Plato's cave shadows, with no idea of which are the significant elements to attend, nor any idea whether consciousness-related aspects of brain activity align with any aspect of physics' description of the material universe (i.e. are they measurable using the tools of science).

This is what I mean by the hubris of physicists - their assumption is inevitably that they have a complete description of physical reality, so if the biologists aren't able to attribute consciousness to elements of that description, they mustn't be trying hard enough or thinking clearly enough (like we physicists can). This isn't an appeal to mysticism; aspects of the physical world now accepted, initially overturned previously "complete" descriptions, the most obvious being quantum mechanics, and it is quite likely that conscious experience involves aspects of matter not currently included in the physics worldview. The reason for this is straightforward: there is no scientific framework which incorporates subjectivity, because our scientific framework excludes subjectivity, axiomatically. Biologists get policed for invoking "woo" in the relationship between neural activity and experience, but if a physicist drops e.g. relativity or quantum states of microtubules as some kind of explanation, people think "well those physicists don't make rash conjectures because it's all based on mathematics" and don't call it out as one of those arguments like "if X is a mystery and Y is a mystery ... MAYBE X IS Y!!!1!".

I say all this after grinding through 30 minutes of the video (and thinking the interviewer spoke with greater clarity than the subject). I will have a read of the transcript and see if I can hang with the argument thereafter.

Sorry to be crabby about it. The inability of science to deal with subjectivity is so frustrating and I don't have the slightest idea where to start, so anyone who reminds me of that cops a serve.

I want to thank the good folks of this thread for making interesting, challenging and exciting arguments and observations - particularly in fields I know shit about, like philosophy, and in raising the arguments of thinkers I haven't encountered. I hope my missives come across as the enthusiasm of someone who loves to argue about this stuff because it matters SO MUCH.

haaa I just realised I made the same argument I was trying to mock, when I said that quantum mechanics overturned physics' worldview ... and maybe the consciousness-relevant aspects of matter would too !!!1!

It's fun to argue about because everyone has skin in the game and no-one (including neuroscientists sorry guys) knows anything (about the hard problem) and any theory involves believing at least one crazy thing.

No argument from me about the neuro ignorance

One of the strands of thought described in Kuhn's Landscape of Consciousness paper is "Quantum theories" (Kuhn's label). In many cases, these have been proposed by physicists but not exclusively. Within the "quantum" main thread there are sub-threads: some posit quantum entanglement in the brain (e.g. Roger Penrose), some focus on the role of the "observer" in quantum theory (e.g. Henry Stapp), whereas others focus more on the relativism aspect and seeking a grand unification theory (Lee Smolin, Carlo Rovelli). I guess its natural to see some sort of connection there. Many of the early pioneers of quantum theory saw some kind of connection to consciousness in their work (eg. Planck, Schrodinger, de Broglie), though it seems much less popular for physicists to talk this way nowadays.

Yeah, the apparent ability of a conscious observer to collapse a quantum superposition to a deterministic outcome is hard to ignore.

I don't know the hard science of any of it, neuroscience or physics, but it seems to me an interesting direction that both of them push in contemplating consciousness is toward asking not only "what are we" but "what is all of this?" In that sense the Hard Question might not even be the right question, or is just a part of a larger one.

One of the things I like about the paper I posted is that it's not about the hard problem, it's attacking a different, related problem: what's the simplest being that we'd consider sentient? Gets at similar themes from a different angle.

I've read it, it's a good summary, even if the conclusion is basically "it's a hard problem"! The guy in the link I started this revive with touches on it, he talks about affective valence and thinks that having an internal model of the world, that includes a model of the self, is a requirement.

what's the simplest being that we'd consider sentient?

I like this approach. One reason I think the hard problem seems so hard is that the distinction between consciousness and non-conscious matter seems so stark. If we could somehow put these concepts on a spectrum with gradations, perhaps we could make if not peace then at least an uneasy detente with them. Bergson suggests a similar line of thought in his Matter and Memory, but more from an introspective angle. Paying close attention to our own conscious experiences to see if we can catch a glimpse of how they shade away into unconscious processes.

the apparent ability of a conscious observer to collapse a quantum superposition to a deterministic outcome is hard to ignore.

entirely illusory! superpositions simply collapse at scale, could never be maintained for something big enough to be human observable.

what if there isn't such a thing as unconsciousness

^ that's the classic rabbit hole for all this kind of inquiry. we think we know what consciousness is because we experience it. but the more you ask about it, the less you know, until you are forced to admit your pure bafflement and ignorance.

What I love to do is think about how crazy it is that consciousness exists, then move on to how crazy it is that *anything* exists, then bounce back and forward between them as I get more freaked out and weirdly paranoid. It's great entertainment just before bedtime.

so hard not to be that guy in this thread, saying spiritual and religious traditions are right next door and have a lot to offer on these subjects (and have for millenia), but that science/philosophy guys seem to be terrified of the neighbors.

but imo the good ones are more about accepting and submitting to the mystery and the madness rather than trying to direct and control it.

totally. but it's still fun to talk about like "what if all our cells have proto-sentience"

haha absolutely

I guess spiritual/religious traditions are unsatisfying if they're based on faith - "it is" - but I agree they provide a framework for thinking about existence and so on. Of course my coward's refuge is the universal mind of Buddhism, which is just pushing the question down a few levels.
I am interested in whether it's true that Galileo put these kinds of questions outside the boundaries of science as a compromise to avoid heresy, and thereby sabotaged any chance of addressing them. It's hard to find useful discussion online and I wouldn't know where to start reading about it.

I think Buddhism can resonate with scientific and philosophical inquiry into consciousness. (I have a feeling this is true of some mystic traditions too, but I'm not versed in them enough to say.) This essay by Thich Nhat Hanh about consciousness is full of ideas and metaphors that have analogs in scientific and philosophical conceptions. https://www.lionsroar.com/the-four-layers-of-consciousness/

Suppose you type something on your computer and this information is stored on the hard drive. That hard drive is like store consciousness. Although the information doesn’t appear on the screen, it is still there. You only need to click and it will manifest. The bija, the seeds in store consciousness, are like the data you store on your computer. If you want to, you can click and help it appear on the screen of mind consciousness. Mind consciousness is like a screen and store consciousness is like the hard drive, because it can store a lot in it. Store consciousness has the capacity of storing, maintaining, and preserving information so that it can’t be erased.

Unlike information on a hard drive, however, all the seeds are of an organic nature and they can be modified. The seed of hatred, for example, can be weakened and its energy can be transformed into the energy of compassion. The seed of love can be watered and strengthened. The nature of the information that’s being kept and processed by the store consciousness is always flowing and always changing. Love can be transformed into hate, and hate can be transformed back into love.

That description of mind consciousness is not far from Dennett's user-screen metaphor of consciousness:

Pressing icons on our phones makes us feel in control. We feel in charge of the hardware inside. But what we do with our fingers on our phones is a rather pathetic contribution to the sum total of phone activity. And, of course, it tells us absolutely nothing about how they work.

Human consciousness is the same, says Dennett. "It's the brain's 'user illusion' of itself," he says.

https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-39482345

Yeah if you're looking for the intersection of Buddhism and neuroscience really recommend https://direct.mit.edu/books/monograph/4061/The-Embodied-MindCognitive-Science-and-Human

Thompson wrote a newer book "Mind in Life" going over similar territory but I haven't read it

Thanks! Good leads. I just remembered I have a book of conversations between the Dalai Lama and neuroscientists that I have never fucking read.

Its an interesting point on how spiritual/religious views could influence one's perspective on the Mind/Body question. My knowledge of religion is limited mainly to the Christian tradition. It seems like within that tradition there is a range of views. Christian theology is often thought to support more of a dualistic metaphysics (spirit vs matter) at least in the work of contemporary philosophers of faith. However, historically I don't think that has been the case. Thomist philosophy for instance, from my limited understanding, is not dualist, or at least not in the most common form. The body and soul were more like two different aspects of a common substance, so maybe a bit more like contemporary aspect dual-aspect monism. In ancient times, I don't think Christians thought about the Mind/Body question in the way we understand it today. It seems like in the early Christian writings you find a range of interpretations, including some which sound more like materialism (though of course with a different understanding of matter than what we have today).

Also there's the famous case of Bishop George Berkeley who resolved the Mind/Body question by denying the existence of the Body part.

xpost Varela, one of the authors of The Embodied Mind, has a very interesting theory of cognition called autopoiesis, which he developed with his mentor Humberto Maturana. It takes the subject's referent to be itself/its model of the world, but is a thoroughly naturalist philosophy of mind. Been a long time since I've read his work on it, but found it very compelling.

Maturana was a biologist and participated in the Macy Conferences when cybernetics was in its nascency. He was also tabbed by Allende to work on project cybersyn. I'd strongly recommend their book The Tree of Knowledge.

Had never heard of The Tree of Knowledge, looking forward to reading it.

Hope you enjoy

looks really interesting, thanks

thrift store today provided me with a copy of David Chalmers' The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory for $2, I'm taking it as a sign.

Nice, let us know how it is. The ones above look interesting too but I'm not shelling out £20 for them. I scoured my dad's bookshelves for the Dennett but no joy, it's probably in a box in the garage. Maybe I should read that copy of Phi by Giulio Tononi that I bought years ago.

That Chalmers is good if a bit dry. It’s not too technical but you can tell it was written by a philosophy professor. It’s pretty careful and systematic, which is kind of a plus in a topic which attracts a lot of woo.

The Ezra Klein interview with Michael Pollan about his new book on consciousness wanders through a lot of the territories discussed upthread. Starts rooted in evolutionary theory and then follows that out to psychedelics, even hits on idealism and panpsychism. You can find the podcast episode in usual podcast places, but here's a gift link to the transcript if you don't want to hear these guys talk (I preferred the audio, because that's where you can hear how sort of mind-blown both of them are about it all. Lots of discussion of meditation too.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/31/opinion/eza-klein-podcast-michael-pollan.html?unlocked_article_code=1.YFA.Viw3.m1qutODDMGmu&smid=url-share