alt Hacker News> Question: who says math cannot result in consciousness?
Which math? Why some kinds of information processing and not others? If all information processing leads to consciousness: why does consciousness stop at the boundary of the brain? Why isn't every neuron individually and separately conscious? Why not the two hemispheres of the brain? Why isn't every causally-linked volume of the universe a single mind?
> Implicitly assumes that the formation of consciousness is NOT among the things we've learned while mapping out all features of the brain.
The point is that it's not clear at all what empirical knowledge we could acquire that would explain consciousness. Is in: what is the shape of the answer, and can a collection of material facts about the world have that shape?
> Of course it's hard to define consciousness if the implicit definition is "certainly not anything that I don't like." The hard problem of consciousness is only hard because the default human move is to _make_ it hard.
This is just a tiresome ad hominem. I want to be a materialist and an eliminativist. I would like this to be simple!
Replies
> Why some kinds of information processing and not others?
Consciousness isn't something the information processing has, it is something the information processing does. It's a function, not some magic property that happens on top.
Consciousness is simply your brains ability to figure out what part of all the sensory input it gets can be attributed to the "self", just like other parts might be labeled as cats, dogs, table and chairs, some will be labeled as self.
And I am sure one day somebody will boil that down to some nice math, since fundamentally it's about networks. If the brain wants to move a hand from one spot to another, that's easy if it is its own hand, a couple of nerve impulses and it will happen. If that hand belongs to somebody else, moving it is a whole different ballgame. That fundamental different in connectedness should be expressible.
>The point is that it's not clear at all what empirical knowledge we could acquire that would explain consciousness.
It's special pleading. What empirical knowledge you could acquire that would let you understand a tesseract? There are many things that are difficult to understand.
> The point is that it's not clear at all what empirical knowledge we could acquire that would explain consciousness.
What about this: - this class of brain circuits are not not firing when the person is (unconscious, in deep sleep,a newborn/animal obviously just directly responding to outside stimuli), while obviously active when a person performs conscious activity - this class of brain circuits does not exists at very primitive species and is progressively more developed the higher the evolution chain you go
> If all information processing leads to consciousness
Did you actually read what you just responded to?
Can we start by defining consciousness as something that could be quantified physically, rather than a nebulous concept? With a common shared ground, we could at least define why we are all sure that individual neurons are unconscious.
To anticipate a possible question about my definition: I don’t have a strict one. I’m almost completely with Rovelli on this one. I think the day we find a proper definition of the concept we’ll have done the first step is solving the (one and only) “easy” problem of consciousness. But I’m open to hearing your own definition since I feel like I just can’t grasp your concerns. I must be missing something.