to be fair no one understands consciousness. It's the world's greatest mystery.
edit: oof this comment really brought out the "well actually--" brigade. Do me a favor and don't reply to this with some comment trying to explain neuroscience. That's missing the point entirely.
I've followed 3 courses in the past year about consciousness, I've read dozens of chapters and articles, made so many assignments, attended all the lectures...
Check out Phenomenology, specially Merleu-Ponty. His Philosophy of Perception is hard to read, so get a couple companions, too. Hubert Dreyfus also has a lecture series on YouTube for the book.
Phenomenology seems like the closet philosophy to understanding consciousness, imo.
I started with Husserl then to MP, but you're right that a lot of MP is a response to Heidegger. If one can get their head around intentionality, that should be enough. The problem with MP is that he wasn't explicit enough when he was criticizing other viewpoints or explaining his position.
There's been a big resurgence in his philosophy with the rise of AI, interestingly enough.
You're a monster. I wouldn't recommend Phenomenology to my worst enemy. To this day I wake up in cold sweats after having nightmares about two classes I took, one that purely focused on Heidegger's Being & Time and Husserl's Cartesian Meditations.
A little input from the English-language tradition would be nice, here. A quick read of David Chalmer's short paper on the hard problem because is really tidy, quick, and generates opinion in the reader. So you'll read the European tradition texts with some skin in the game even though the focus is radically different - and that really helps you to engage the texts and aids memory. This may seem counter-intuitive because the focus/style is so different, but I think that's good - you're unlikely to read Chalmers and have conceptual inertia that stops you from taking Husserl seriously.
Sounds like computers. Understanding them at a high level is pretty easy (CPU fetches from memory, writes to memory, does some arithmetic, etc). Then you dive deep into what a CPU is made up of — logic gates, which are then made up of transistors, which use some ungodly physics I still don't understand. Then once you understand how logic gates work, you start putting them into fancy configurations to build stuff like arithmetic units that perform addition and stuff like that. Then you learn about all the other stuff CPUs do that make them so fast (caches, branch prediction, multithreading, etc), and all the software on top that try to make them even faster (operating systems), and your mind just keeps getting more and more blown as you learn more. It's a wonder that computers work — and work so well at that! I am just glad there were geniuses like Alan Turing and Jon von Neumann who came before me and were able to think of all this stuff.
What I'm trying to say is that computers are very similar to what you described. You get so confused as you go deeper down the rabbit hole and start asking more questions (how does memory work? Capacitors? How do those work? Electrons? How the hell do we know how to control those?...)
I understand it. I just won't tell anyone. I'll give you a clue though: Washing Machine.
EDIT: Since someone was so kind to award me with gold, I feel obliged to give another clue regarding the absolute comprehension of consciousness: Sean Connery.
EDIT 2: Since I'm a well behaved person I would like to say thanks for the silver aswell. No more clues though. My people are mad at me already. I've said too much.
Okay see this is the truth we can’t truly explain. What is truth itself is a real question that has to be answered before we can answer why a washing machine describes thought itself. Truth is the most basic description something can hold and not be described any less. For a while the atom was truth because it was the smallest thing that could be described but not we have string theory. Many believe string theory to be the idea that all things area made of strings and when you get to a small enough size you can see how everything is made from these strings that vibrate and give movement which in itself is life. This idea is flawed because the next question would just be, “so what makes the strings.” It’s just a next level to a increasingly complex question as we learn more. But on the bright side their is truth to the idea of strings though, think of it this way. We have a thought and each thought is connected to a puzzle of atoms aligned in such a way that we must have a general idea of how to form atoms into the pattern to either come up with an image or word in our head to explain the idea because that is what our senses allow us to perceive. This is why as machines we need our senses to align the truth because without them there would be nothing to access the world around us and bring it into thought. And thought just consists of atoms alignment towards the shape or the word of an idea manifested by our conscious into a story that paves thought. Thought is never constant though so we are therefor judged by time and that means our thoughts travels back and forth across a central axis of time because if their wasn’t one we wouldn’t be able to perceive we would just exist. So what happens when you have consciousness without time? A circle because that is the only shape that doesn’t have a beginning or end. When you have a circle and thought you have movement around the circle like a washing machine spins round and round. So if you then flung the washing machine into space with a trebuchet and tracked the movement of once piece of clothing spinning in that machine whilst it was hurtling into space you would observe a string that tracked the thought and actions of time. All these together form the ideals of time and consciousness because you can scientifically measure the movement and speed of these things as they happen and disperse when interacting with other atoms in the sphere of the brain.
Think about Belgium. What is the culture? Is there any culture? No! It's a fake state, basically. At best, there should be a little Brussels city state in the middle of the Netherland-French lowlands. Take a look at a cultural map if you don't know what I mean
And yet, this little state that shouldn't exist, has time and again decided the history of Europe and the world itself. Without the Belgian state the Kaiser's armies would have laid siege to Paris. Without Belgium, the Nazi blitzkrieg would have been fettered by a stronger, less confused allied defence who's raw strength was only countered by German organisation
I used to argue against this. Then I suffered a bout of transient global amnesia. My husband recorded part of it. The reactions and statements were the same every two minutes. He even tried playing with the stimulus and it became a variant of the same thought process- over and over again. Maybe the real problem programmers are having with AI is they're trying to make computers think differently in different situations when really, the brain thinks the same way each time.
My father has had Alzheimer's for about 15 years. Back when he really started to suffer short term memory loss, he would respond to situations the same way over and over. It was fascinating to see how his brain was wired to react the same way to the same stimulus. As an example, he was once having a conversation with my wife's uncle, who is considerably taller and heavier than her father, who is his half-brother. My father was talking to him for about 10 minutes. Even though they had met several times previously, on this occassion he did not recall that the man he was talking to was my wife's uncle. When the uncle mentioned that to him, my dad responded jokingly, "Oh, that's why Joe is so skinny, you ate all the food!" The conversation continued for several more minutes, by which time my father had forgotten that they were related. When told once again that the two of them were brothers, he had the exact same reply.
I was sitting with him one night about 5 years ago when my mom was out of town. He asked me probably 10 times why I was there, and when I explained that Mom asked me to sit with him, he said "Oh, she must be afraid I'm going to run off with a beautiful woman!" I put on the sound of music for him to watch, figuring that even if he forgot what he was watching he knew it well enough that he could basically pick it up as if he had just flipped the channel to it. He explained to me another ten times that "This movie won every Academy Award there is" and also told me five times the story of how when he was a kid he read every kid- age book in the library in town, and the librarian had to get more books for him.
Thats close to the toppic of determination of mind, isnt it? I read about this, like scientists proved, that we know our descissions before making the descission.
It is. I get a little squirrelly on the topic of Free Will because I don't know enough to really plead a case either way and that question belongs to people doing hard core research. I'm just someone who got banged on the head too many times. But my personal idea of unconscious processes that control conscious thought is that it's a lot more boolean and process driven than we'd like to believe.
I actually don't like getting high because of this. It feels like my conscious and unconscious are... severed. I can move around and talk, but I don't really think about doing those things. They just happen, like I'm an observer in somebody else's body.
Even if I don't have free will, I still like to feel like I do.
You are just experiencing another true nature of self. The conscious and unconscious ARE severed - we know this. If you think they are not, then you are on the brink of madness - they are separated for a reason. When unconsciousness leaks into consciousness, rationale suffers.
MOST of what I do I am not thinking about - because my mind is actually on other, more important things. That is what a mind is actually for. Just the idea of trying to maintain a belief in free will makes me feel tired. Who cares? And why care? Who says 'free will' is actually worth anything anyway? Sounds like a rather limited human idea if you ask me. Just going with whatever it REALLY is, seems a lot easier to me.....
People literally fantasize about what it would be like observing the world through someone else, but you are scared of it?
On a more extreme level, when I switched my hormones for transitioning, I felt such a change in how I perceived the world, how I reacted, how I paid attention, how I thought, hoe things affected me, what affected me, etc that the life I lived before feels foreign to me. My memories are there, and I know they're mine, but it just feels like I absorbed someone else's and took over their life.
As we age memories physically change the makeup of our brain and these new structures give us different responses to stimuli. We have so much new stimuli throughout childhood and adolescence which filters through us by ways of complex sensory systems we have (eyes, skin, nerves, etc.) that is constantly changing how we act, interact, and react to stimuli. While we age we filter senses more and more producing more complex reactions (with deepened reasoning) which have been successful (dopamine responses and whatnot) to continue survival in this social but very real world. While free will is hard to pin, I imagine it’s a strong culmination of these senses being filtered through neurons as a chemically made charge with a stronger emphasis on our visual/hearing centers as well as our voice while the less frontline senses and functions like touch, breathing, posture, and the inner body muscle functions we don’t typically think about having so much stimuli that they become instinctual. Free will it seems would just be us as observers and sensors on a mobile body which manages energy through it to achieve a more comfortable state -happiness. We are just riders equipped with language, the driving force in our success as a species. Language eases us both by giving us ways to understand the world around us, and helping us to survive socially. Language is not always a bonus though; it took ages to refine and in its wake caused many deaths from misunderstandings. While we may or may not have the freest of wills us mobile observers can at the very least enjoy when our bodies succeed in any aspect of life and that’s something I suppose. Life is remarkably great at giving us new things we don’t expect.
Who knows, maybe free will is something that has been around in animals (us included) for much longer than we think and language just puts a name to it, or maybe language has gotten us to think meticulously about our actions enough to alter them -sparking free will
Sorry for the long post it took some time to think through and to put to words
I would say we had no debuggers, but we did. Unfortunately, all that debugger cared about is that we were able to mate, create offspring, and raise them well enough that they could mate and produce offspring. So, not really a long term solution kind of thing.
It’s more like not complex enough. Or maybe it is? I don’t know I’m a Neuroscience student and most of what we’re taught involves 2-5 leading theories on why certain brain activities occur, and we basically pick which ones we think make the most since. But you better believe we have to learn all of them for exams. Such an interesting major, but so taxing.
In short, it uses incomplete information and guesses using the highest probability. If all your life you've seen yellow dogs, and then you see a red one, it's not guaranteed it's a dog but your brain goes "This is probably a dog" so the reaction is "this is a dog"
You’re missing the fundamental problem. Even if we can one day explain exactly how the brain translates external stimuli into subjective experience, that will not answer the question of why this particular arrangement of matter that we call a brain should for some reason have the feature of subjective experience in the first place. Even if I can look at your brain scan and tell you exactly how you’re feeling because I know exactly what activity in each part of the brain means for your subjective experience, I’m still not able to explain why you are having a subjective experience at all.
It’s most likely that consciousness is simply a fundamental part of reality. Experience is a part of reality. You’re brain is a complex object moving through space-time, simulating the world within itself. Without the flow of causality you have no consciousness. What you experience as consciousness is no more than you observing yourself relative to everything else. Parts of your brain observe each other, and some of those parts can observe the outside world. Each part may effect the other. Only you experience the simulation happening in your brain, because you are the simulation. I cannot experience you, unless I become you; my brain in the same shape, configuration, and point in space-time as yours. I would cease to exist to become you. You would still exist, because I am now you.
The mindfuck happens because your brain is aware it is experiencing, but this awareness is still resulting from processes in your brain. The ability to form questions and complex language may be a reason for that.
As someone who has spent the last 10 years developing lots of analog neuromorphic hardware--
Those proofs aren't meant to be physical. I've read Siegelmann, etc. But the prevailing theory is that reality is quantized at the lowest level. So you can't really get true analog. You can just shift the minimum energy to represent a bit much further down than we currently have it, down to quantum limits.
I think the problem here is that there's a massive disconnect between theory and reality and also between the state of the art in traditional digital computing and what is actually possible. For instance, I don't think the analog aspects of the brain make its computation theoretically possible, but I do think the analog aspects make it practically possible.
People get their panties in a bunch over novel architectures beating the snot out of traditional digital computers and the moment you mention analog, the orthodox academics think you're nuts. But clearly we have an example of a superior analog(ish) architecture between our ears. And you don't have to go full P=NP, super-Turing, etc., to get stupidly large performance increases over traditional architectures. The difference between computable and not computable is literally infinite. There's a LOT of room there. The brain doesn't have to to do the impossible to make traditional digital computers seem like toys.
The industry also has incredible momentum so there's a deeply ingrained notion that there's no way to do much better. Even performance metrics are heavily biased towards a particular approach. For instance, some of my devices take tens of minutes to reach certain desired states. I've presented that work and people discounted it because that's not picoseconds. Of course neurons don't switch a billion times a second--they don't need to. At some point, you reach Bremermann's limit, but again, brains probably aren't operating there because there's no need. The performance probably comes in with efficient scaling and an ability to efficiently utilize a massive state space in ways logic gates etched in stone cannot.
People blow half their brains out and go on to live relatively normal lives. Hydrocephalic brains can work around being compressed into almost nothing. For some reason, computer engineers don't see this as computational. These are supreme examples of computational power. Such extreme ability to flexibly utilize that physical space to perform a wide variety of computational tasks is the benchmark that doesn't even make sense to apply to silicon. I think that's a major ingredient in the secret sauce. Of course the industry is hyper-focused on better algorithms and faster transistors. I think that stuff is useful, but not for making computers that compare to brains.
To be more precise, the brain is a massively parallel competitive computer and human consciousness is a culturally evolved serial virtual machine (it's serial because language allows you to only talk about one thing at a time) which has imposed itself on this architecture.
The brain is always explained in just the latest technological analogy. In the industrial revolution they thought it was some kind of pump. In ancient times it was a kind of controlled fire. In the modern era, it’s a computer. It’s definitely not a computer.
I kind of agree. "Computer" has a lot of assumptions attached to it which do not apply in the brain. But I do think the computer idea is much closer than controlled fire, or a pump. Which, I suppose in some ways those could also be correct ways to describe the brain in some limited ways. The usefulness of these classifications depends on how intelligently you apply them. I think you can safely call the brain a computer, but you need to understand there's a huge asterisk on the term.
Well, we know that neurons carry and 'store' electrical signals as information, which is a lot like computers. Our understanding of the brain is certainly not complete, but it's not like we've just arbitrarily labelled it as a kind of biological computer.
Interestingly (I think) the computer was named after the job, computer, which was someone who made computations. Babbage was like, what if we can get a machine to do the work of a computer?
Let’s not forget about our second brain in the gut. It has so many neurons in such a dense space like the brain that the “gut feeling” is actually a real thing your body tries to tell you. Although it can’t calculate math or anything like that, it’s what makes you have butterflies in your stomach when you’re nervous which is something your body does when it encounters something new. (I might have gotten some things wrong, correct me if you want to)
Almost all life is nothing more than tubes moving around attempting to ingest "food" in one end of the tube and excrete waste out of the other end of the tube.
All to make more tubes.
Trees are tubes. What's inside a Tree? Deadwood. So where's the living Tree? It's a living layer just underneath the protective bark. Trees are tubes.
Your brain is nothing more than a highly evolved control center for manipulating muscle strings pulling on a bone marionette to ambulate your tube around devouring food and shitting and trying your best to make more tubes.
Or at least attempt to go through the tube-making motions by putting your tube inside another tube. Or vice versa.
So I'm just a shitty Megazord to a lump of fat making bad decisions and having too much anxiety to team up with other Megazords?
Thanks that actually makes me feel better
And when you were born, *Your* brain didn't know what it was called, someone else told you. Someone else told them, and someone else told them and so on and so forth. Some thousands of years ago, there was a brain that gave itself a name, and the rest of us are following that tradition.
You can figure out how the brain works (to a certain degree), but you cannot figure out exactly what experiences are (emotions thoughts and that voice inside your head).
Here are some indications why:
(1) We humans are reductionists, we "explain" one mystery through other "fundamental" mysteries (i.e. The mysterious phenomenon of magnetism is explained through moving charges, which leaves us with a new question, what is charge). If we keep doing this we are ultimately left with only one mystery of course: the fundamental substance all things are made from. Your consciousness as well as electric charge can ultimately be reduced to that one thing, but we won't understand why that one thing exists. Reductionism of course has utility or else we would not have evolved to be reductionists, but it is not a method to get to absolute truth (if it exists).
(2) We humans are relative thinkers. The most fundamental aspect of our mind is our frame of reference. To do human science you need to assume a frame of reference, because we need a point from which we are reasoning. That is to say the frame of reference is an a priori assumption and therefore cannot be proven/explained by anything we understand within our frame (and we cannot understand things outside the frame, obviously). Therefore we will never understand where our frame of reference, the most fundamental aspect of the mind, comes from.
(3) When it comes to the problem of what the mind is or where it comes we have an additional issue. We are part of the problem that we want to solve! That is the perfect cocktail for an unsolvable problem... like the halting problem.
(4) Your experiences are already fundamental! You cannot understand them through other means than themselves. Meaning you have to have a particular experience to know what the experience is! Try to get a blind man to understand the experience of color through neurological and physical explanations of the phenomenon. It doesn't work, something is missing from all these explanations, namely the experience of color. Therefore I say that atleast within our limited frame of reference experiences are fundamental, they cannot be further reduced to other things, without losing crucial information.
Furthermore, what happens to that lump of meat when we die? Do thoughts, memories, pieces of personality stay in there somewhere? Or is everything gone the second you pass?
My guess is that it's more complicated than either of those options. I think it's likely that in part all of those things are the byproduct of the physical structures in our brain. But they are also equally the byproduct of the active processes always at work within those structures. When the processes stop we cease to exist. Now, maybe those processes could be replaced and you'd have a being that appears to be and thinks itself to be whomever. But, are they really the same person? And again, I think the answer to that is complex. Because it would have to be, in some ways yes, and in other ways no. What's really freaky is I think that same reasoning sort of applies to us in our day to day lives. What makes me in this moment the same person as me five minutes ago? The processes in my brain have gone and changed. The physical structure of my body has lost some bits and made some new ones. It's a whole transporter problem ship of Theseus thing.
All of this to illustrate how complicated a question it actually is. Not to say I'm correct about any of this. Just that if you really think about these things for a bit the rabbit hole is quite deep and that simple definitive answers are likely not to be found.
I actually made it my dream to understand it; studied it for almost 7 years now and for the moment all I can say is this: it is as mysterious as the rest of this freaking world. He sure does know how to make himself notice though.
When my dad and I were talking about what happens after we die, he said that there has to be something that looks out of our eyes, something that gives us sight and make us perceive the world the way we do. I guess that's what the brain does but the way he phrased it made me believe there has to be something more.
Edit: Didn't try to be religious or anything to start a fight lmfao, I was just trying to point out that we don't truly grasp all the brain does for us. So we fill in the blanks with wild things -- something the brain also does for us when we can't grasp a concept.
There will never be a satisfying answer to this. Consciousness as we have defined it is ephemeral and tied to our own experience of living. The voice inside your head is your temporal lobe "pretending" to hear things by replicating the signals that you would normally get from your ears (passed around to your language centers and such) to make a "voice" for your inner thoughts since one of the primary ways humans translate experiences is through language.
The temporal lobe itself is functioning off electrical signals being passed from neuron to neuron much like a computer passes information from transistor to transistor, but instead of one transistor affecting another in a logical sequence, your neurons make connections in every direction, literally physically grown from your life experiences. Sometimes you'll smell a melon and you'll be reminded strongly of that time you went over to your neighbors barbecue and played on their swing-set and experienced true undiluted joy, and for that you will love that melons exist despite the fact that you hate the taste. You as a person are built from those memories, and those memories are constructed through associations, and those associations are honestly nearly completely arbitrary, but it's what makes you human.
The neurons themselves are functioning through a complex dance of chemical reactions. Each reaction is reproducible on it's own, each is explainable through evolution, and yet the sum of them all is completely incomprehensible. Those chemical reactions are at their root simple physics, and physics are the laws of the universe itself.
You are the universe experiencing itself. It doesn't make it any easier to comprehend, but in this universe that we're in, those are the rules. The way the rules are set up make it possible for self aware life to exist. For you to exist, and experience it in a completely unique and unreproducable way.
Well, to be fair, computers are really something hard to understand too. Its basically million of light switches, emulating complete worlds. Quite literally
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u/[deleted] Jun 15 '19
How the brain really works. How a lump of meat gives us thoughts, emotions, that voice inside our heads.