Moreover, the very framework in which the current scientific work is done might well be just an emergent data structure used by what we understand as consciousness to navigate whatever the objective reality is in a way that is simpler and more effective than having to access quantum states and particle trajectories through senses.

That being said, I think that there is something intrinsically insufficient in language itself to describe this wholistic relationship between consciousness, qualia and the perceived world. My take is that for anything to be communicated through symbols it has to undergo a reduction process which is essential to the flow of information to occur, otherwise you would have to communicate the entire universe at once, which is just impossible. You have to reduce reality to a set of symbols for the symbols itself to make sense. That is the whole premise of language, that a word has meaning only when immersed in other words (cow represents a cow insofar it doesn't represent anything else besides a cow).

If this is true, and Gödel incompleteness Theorem is essential, then this whole talk might take us closer to representing the experience of consciousness but there might never be a unifying theory, because for that to exist, that has to be a language that represents everything without reducing it to none of its parts, a theory without postulates.

The batshit crazy thing about Tom is that he shows you ways that you can individually experiment and prove through your own experiences the things he's positing. His My Big Toe trilogy goes into all this, but I shudder to recommend it. Tedious slog.

If you really want to prove it to yourself, it's not too hard. This book by Kenneth Daz, "The Last Astral Projection Book You'll Ever Need", is the best way I've found, he's read endlessly and summarized it into a hundred pages.

So far I've rolled out of my body twice now. Floated through my front door and got down my road a fair ways. Fully conscious, able to make choices, full memory after returning to my body. No psychedelics involved. You can't of course talk to anyone about this. My wife knows but she's been naturally OBE'ing since she's a kid.

(Edit, I can't believe I'm not being down voted to oblivion here. Love HN).

If you were able to roam around free of physics, then certainly you would leave not only your human body, but you would have to take account of the earth moving around the sun as well (at breakneck speed, mind you). You'd probably be either a few kilometers inside our planet or up in the air, and then in space, in practically no time.

So, call me unconvinced about OBE's. It's most likely just your mind playing tricks on you.

It’s trivially easy to make up flawed theories on how OBEs work without having that absolute frame of reference. Arguing that it requires one seems like a scummy straw man argument and a bad faith attempt to conceptualize the idea - it’s up to you what to believe but you need to try harder to think about possibilities on how it might happen if you want to reason about it.

I am just positing one problem with OBEs. The burden of proof is completely on people who believe in the existence of OBEs, because it physically does not make any sense to have them.

I've no idea who Tom is, so I followed up on what you wrote and believe I have enough of a glimpse to see he's a crackpot theorist. Being a physicist doesn't abscond one of the burden of proof. Apparently he's been cooking up a new double slit experiment for the past decade+.

Yeah... OK... let's not even get started on falsifiability.

You can actually do this. Takes about ten or so tries over a few weeks for most. I haven't tried to fly like a bird yet. Hopefully I'll get to experience that next.

Maybe other expressions that don't match our observations might not be entirely invalid, they might just represent different emergent worlds not unlike the one we perceive through our senses. Maybe they could map to these transcendental or mystical experiences, I don't know, only guessing here.

In any case, it serves us well to have untainted clarity in our objectives. If we intend to create abstractions that correlate to the real world and help us create tools that somehow explain or help manipulate the perceived reality (which I believe is the only reasonable goal), then falsifiability and proof in this sense is essential, and I have to agree with you.

Do you think it's plausible we live in a simulated existence? If so, how? If not, why not? (very broad questions, am aware; simply wanted to get an input on your perspective).

I used to think the question that should preclude this one is if the universe is even able to host a simulation of itself, but given that we know it is probable we live in a perceived reality that not only is separated from what we think as objective reality, that this perceived reality is, for the sake of survival, a much simplified version of the objective reality, then it isn't impossible that a base objective reality might harbor countless simulations not unlike the one we possibly live in.

This is however an interesting experiment in a way to guide moral decisions when we encounter technological leaps, like if we ever develop the capability of producing an ASI. I don't think, however, that these considerations are falsifiable, because we can't just "break out" of our possible simulation to see what is what. What might that even mean? Would we be able to tell if we broke out of our simulation? It breeds all sorts of speculations that at the end of the day adds very little to the overall discussion.

What I personally think is that there is something to be perceived and explored ousite of the realm of human concern, in the silence of the absence of the endless chatter of the cognitive consciousness, that is hard to experience and hard to describe, even though it is accessible to everyone, maybe in the form of a question, like "what is really keeping you from experiencing the dharma body of the Buddha?".

I know this is all really esoteric and mystic, but I am really trying very hard to maintain a certain level of philosophical scrutiny here, if only whoever reads this might give me the benefit of the doubt. All in all this is my take on the subject and I hope I don't disappoint you too deeply.

What makes you think dharma body is more real than Santa Claus?

Santa Claus, or any spiritual concept or belief, is not measurable in any objective way. An idea is simply that - an idea. An abstract concept that we internalize consciously or subconsciously.

Am having trouble understanding the pseudo-intellectual argument being used here. If Santa Claus is as real a trees to one, at what point does one draw a conclusion that it's an untenable argument vs. acceptance of anything/everything possible, including unicorns?

I mean, yes that’s precisely one of the main reasons why the spirit stuff is not accepted in science (can’t be effectively measured in a lab), but it’s surprising how people can just boldly declare a head in sand approach to things they don’t understand..

As in, what are you talking about? It's nonsense from an outsider's perspective. What key do you hold that unlocks this other universe of experience besides wishful thinking and subjective interpretation?

We understand love as well as hate.

> What key do you hold that unlocks this other universe of experience besides wishful thinking and subjective interpretation?

We don't hold this key yet, doesn't mean it doesn't exist.

There's a progression I've experienced which I don't think is something a lucid dream is characterized by. Got a hand out, fell out and quickly went back because it scared me. Got out and couldn't see and gave up. Got out and out the front door and that freaked me out. Then finally a half mile down the road.

My next journey I'm going to go farther in my area to places that I've never been and see what they compare to on a fully conscious visit.

One thing that shocked me though was going through my front door. At the time in the OBE I thought this isn't the same front door, particularly the stained glass. Then I went and looked at it in real life after and I realized my OBE recollection was more accurate than my previous knowledge or memory of it.

For decades magician and debunker of supernatural claims James Randi placed a new object on his dining table every month, and offered a million dollar prize to anyone who could tell him what the current object was. Of course the prize was never claimed.

Ask a friend down your block to put something on their dining table. Do your OBE thing and write down what you saw. If you're right you'll have proven you're not lucid dreaming and be world famous for demonstrating the reality of psychic phenomena.

I don't really care about proving this to anyone else. My main reason is to try to talk to my daughter I lost last year. Been really hard...

Because he knows he couldn't. Maybe only subconsciously. The OOBE phenomenon is so old, experienced by so many, it would be ridiculous to thing the proposed tests weren't conducted before. They were, many times, and they failed.

Doing it straight from meditation is quite advanced, takes decades but can be achieved for many in weeks with binaural beats that trigger the brain to get into theta state with a frequency following effect.

Perhaps.

But proving it to anyone else at all is a hell of a leap in difficulty from there.

In the crux of Tom's argument - what can one prove via Astral?

The CIA report is linked in the description.

> It's beyond all categorization whatsoever, and so the Upanishads say, “all we can say of it positively is the negative.” Neti neti; 'it is not this, not that.

The above was specifically referring to “god”, however it’s pretty much the same concept. Anything we can symbolize is effectively not the ineffable thing that we want to represent with the symbols

The next part about the scientific framework being a data structure used by our consciousness blabla quantum particles...seems like just a complicated way to say: we are conscious, even if we don't know everything.

Then, language being necessarily insufficient? Boy you like using lots of complicated words so much, you must be an expert at communicating things. Basically what I get here is: words represent concepts. (Wanking represents wanking insofar it doesn't represent anything else besides a wank. Except when I use the word 'wanking' as a metaphor for mental ejaculation).

Then we start again making dubious links between particle physics and humanities (and of course declaring that one is impossible because of the other, for some reason.) This is the signature move of pseudo-science: using scientific words to appear as an authority to an audience, but then dismissing the pursuit of truth for reasons unrelated to the actual challenges of scientific research.

What I tried to convey what I understood from the ideas Donald Hoffman expressed in a couple of podcasts I listened to (currently in the process of reading his book).

All this debate is more in the realm of philosophy in my opinion, which of course doesn't exempt anyone the burden of proof and consistency, but I don't think the scientific method itself is useful here, since we are talking about fundamentals that precede the scientific method itself (for instance, the question "can apply the scientific method to everything we perceive, including our subjective experience?"). It might pass as mysticism or pseudoscience, hell even Hoffman sounds like that a lot, but I don't think I am qualified to question his insights and dismiss them as academic wankery.

It gets worse for this kind of philosophy as machine learning gets better. Machine learning is a rather simple operation replicated a huge number of times, fed with lightly filtered data about the world. As you add more units and feed in more raw data, it gets smarter.

Now we have a clue about how intelligence really works, and it's upsetting some people.

The classic childish confusion of how vs what is also something to be wary of.

Imagine a program in a computer figuring out it is made out of instructions and bits and bytes, that's how its world works but what exactly is that program? Information? A bunch of complex logic gates? An encoding of logic according to the conscious intent of the programmer? Are programs really at the end of the day a representation of human intent?

Much in the same way, this complex piece of software that we are and our limited awareness of our world such as understanding quantum mechanics (like the program understanding bits and instructions) is just describing how things are not what we, the consciousness (not the one ones) ultimately are.

I suspect a lot of the quantum weirdness might be humans looking at the equivalent of "transistor current" , at such a low level that meaning is obscured where at a higher level things just work in bits represented by low/high volage (digital), without minding specific voltage sampling (analog). Just my unfounded speculation though.

So, given that relatively simple structures can become intelligent when exposed to sufficient data, it can be argued that intelligent structures might be all over the universe, they may not need to be biological, undergo evolution, nor be capable of reproduction. As for where the data comes from, well, the cosmos showers every object with shitload of data from every corner of the depths of the universe.

We know that humans are not special, and intelligence is less complicated as we thought (after removing the overhead of reproduction). Intelligence could be everywhere. The idea of panpsychism is strengthened with recent developments in AI, IMHO.

Everything we know about anything is mediated through our subjective understanding and perception. Be it mathematical formulas that describe the universe or feelings about something. If you remove people, we don’t know what there is, because we have no way of knowing

Sure you can remove some people and have others observe, but that is still mediated by people

We can never truly know anything that we don’t perceive ourselves - so it is just impossible to know anything about a universe that doesn’t include our perception of it

The optimistic take for me is that this is a fundamental feature of the Universe.

If by know we mean prove, then we can know things in other universes that may or may not exist by creating axiomatic systems that don't match our own. If we mean know as believe to the core (such as believing the mechanics of a proof) than we can know many things, some which may be true but unprovable or may simply be false.

I can say I'm aware of neutrinos and believe they exist as formulated, but couldn't say they absolutely exist in our universe. Earlier models only turned out to be approximations.

Is this true? What about logical deductions? Can't you use math and logic to know things without perceiving them?

Regarding your questions:

There is a difference between intellectual knowledge and experience

Sometimes the concept of gnosis is used to differentiate them

So for example, you can read a book about riding a bike, maybe the book is very detailed and tells you everything there is to “know” about riding a bike, but unless you actually ride a bike, you can never “truly know” (experience) what riding a bike is

Now regarding our perception and the universe:

We live in the universe, we are part of it, we can’t ever separate ourselves from it

Then how would we ever be able to remove our perception from it? It’s impossible to truly know

Of course we can speculate and we can come up with endless ideas, but we can never truly know anything that we don’t experience

In that sense, even our ideas are mediated through our inner perception of them

And of course this is my own subjective perception of my reality, as it is all I have

This is often asserted, but I don't see any reason to believe it is true. Just like we can picture creatures that have never existed, and even draw elaborate images of them, with enough detail and introspection we can picture an experience.

And even if we really couldn't, this would at best be a limitation of our wiring, there would be no reason to think it's a limitation of any conscious being. After all, a computer is perfectly able to simulate itself and to simulate any input it could receive, so it can clearly simulate any possible experience it could have given enough details. By the same token, the fact that we can't control our optic nerves (nor other senses) as precisely is an accident of our genetic makeup, not some fundamental property.

Picture it, but not experience it, it’s two different things

Whether our own perception is an accident of our genetic makeup or a fundamental property doesn’t really matter, it’s still the only way we can ever experience the world

And this very much does matter for certain arguments about consciousness. If qualia are separate from thoughts but only through an accident of our own human minds' construction, then all arguments that rely on qualia to argue consciousness must be un physical (Chalmers likes these a lot) are obviously invalid.

Now, if you actually have something interesting to add to the conversation, please do

So if your comment is not about knowledge but only experience then all you are saying is a simple tautology, ie the only way to experience something is to experience it.

This really doesn't hit on the nature of experience or how it is similar or different from knowledge.

Could a memory of an experience be implanted? Yes, such things happen. We experience imaginary things in dreams as well.

It seems problematic to conflate experience and knowledge, which you seem to be doing even while admitting they are different. You seem to argue that experience is a truer form of knowledge but I would push back and argue they are tangential.

He said he believes less and less that consciousness is in the brain. Maybe it's something external, shared, and our brains work more like a camera, and make whatever is out there our own.

It made an impression on me.

The idea has been somewhat famously illustrated in the concept of the muse, an external entity or influence that is the actual source of the ideas that we then channel into our reality

Similar also to what Michelangelo once said:

> The sculpture is already complete within the marble block, before I start my work. It is already there, I just have to chisel away the superfluous material.

On a similar vein of the “not in the brain” concept, there are many proponents of the “embodied” consciousness, meaning that consciousness is in the whole body, not just our brain/nervous system (this is also very briefly touched upon in one episode of the AppleTV series Extrapolations)

https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/06/22/chip-away/

Quote Investigator has located no substantive evidence that Michelangelo or any other great sculptor made this remark. A comment of this type was published in 1858 in “The Methodist Quarterly Review” without any overt humor. The essay discussed poetry, and the author compared the methods of adroit sculptors and poets.

I think it was Terrence McKenna who described the brain as an antenna that tunes in to a certain band of the universal consciousness, and that's what we consider to be the thoughts of an individual.

More or less same idea, slightly different way of phrasing it.

I believe some buddhist practitioners also have a similar way of thinking.

Putting aside the issue of consciousness for a moment, this is actually a great insight

I wonder if something like this should be applied in physics/astronomy to solve the whole dark matter issue

At a “micro level”, we can talk about planets, stars and gravity, but maybe at a “macro level”, those concepts stop being useful to describe the behavior of the universe, and different models might be needed

It's the standard context for thermodynamics (macro) and statistical mechanics (micro) explanations. Sometimes called coarse-graining and fine-graining.

For dark matter there are 3 potential levels:

- micro would be be new dark subatomic particles (WIMPs), or sterile right-handed neutrinos in the Standard Model (see Turok);

- meso is macroscopic clumps of those particles (dark stars) /OR/ no micro, but dark conventional matter objects, like naked black holes, neutron stars or brown dwarves (MACHOs), or perhaps just lots of dust;

- macro would be the truly cosmological state of the whole universe (a stat mech theory over the micro/meso). Think dark matter fluids, and phase changes to dark superfluids, that might have MONDian effects on gravity at the galactic level - and beyond!

Now, regarding the dark matter issue, maybe there are more levels that models can be separated in. It seems overly simplistic to separate the whole immensity of the universe in only 3 levels

But that was circa 1877, around 150 years ago. It is not a great insight today. Please keep up.

It’s still a great insight, regardless of who is remembered in history for coming up with it first

Btw, no one said it was a novel insight

It is ~150 years old and it's a well-known foundation for all current discussion of emergence in general, and consciousness in particular.

Is the fabric of the universe dual or non-dual? If it is non-dual it can have no consciousness. Because the universe would be able to see a "non-universe".

IMHO, consciousness arises out of the universe via the creation of duality by the human mind.

The fabric is unknowable and that frustrates scientists so they make up theories like panpsychism. But is it really just the same sort of anthropomorphic delusions that they have always suffered from. "If I am aware, then so the universe." Guess what, we are not Gods, we are humans.

Adding that consciousness is just when my brain compares a new sense object with an already brain encoded sense object (memory).

Comparison of experiences, with agreement, or refutation, can produce more reliable knowledge than any individual. See Popper, Lakatos, et many al that you seem unaware of.

You can speculate all you want and create as many models as you please, yet you can never know what reality is to anyone else but yourself, nor what reality is outside of your own consciousness

Science approaches truth as an asymptote, which gets ever closer, but can never be reached (see Zeno). Science denies the possibility of claiming truth. Every theory is open to falsification, then revision, qualification or abandonment.

Science is the rigorous and rational application of doubt.

It's doubt all the way down.

Doubt is the only truth.

We create consciousness.

And sure, we are technically not separate from the universe, we are very much immersed in, and inseparable from it

That is certainly how your utterances appear. All language games, as Wittgenstein might have said.

No more discussion with you, just downvotes, troll.

I don't believe nico is literally an LLM - ChatGPT would have more knowledge of physics and philosophy.

However, I do believe nico is a troll, in the sense of deliberately extending a discussion by exaggerating ambiguity, false challenges, pretend misunderstandings, real ignorance of the subject, bland blatherings and faux pedantic quibbles over the definition of terms (e.g 'novel' and 'great' in different historical contexts).

Wow, look how constructive that was for conversation! /s

What you are doing is the very behavior that makes HN a toxic place and why so many end up avoiding discussion

You can’t control your emotions regarding an online conversation so you lash out and have a meltdown like a toddler, blindly downvoting someone that won’t agree with you

For more on 'blue' and 'chocolatey', check out this video...

How did consciousness evolve - with Nicholas Humphrey

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9QWaZp_2I1k

I want to add as well that genetics are a type of memory as well, and there might be two types of "conscioucness", one of the brain and one of the body.

"If material world is like 3 points of a triangle then consciousness can be as inscribed circle"

This bit -- "nor why consciousness is lost in states such as dreamless sleep, general anaesthesia, and coma" -- begs the question. We don't actually know that consciousness is lost in these states, just that people report no memory of consciousness when emerging from these states. This is a fact about memory, not consciousness.

And this comes back to the basic problem of consciousness: we have no test of it other than personal report. If you assume that anything that does not tell you it is conscious is not conscious, then you're left with consciousness being an emergent property. Somehow Bob was without consciousness and now he has it again! What changed? But you don't actually have proof of this, it's just an assumption. And a reason to be suspicious of it is that it is a flattering and convenient assumption. It means many things and beings have no moral valence. You can leave them out of your ethics. Arguably it isn't consciousness but suffering or pleasure that is relevant here, but consciousness is a necessary ingredient. "That lobster looks like it suffers when it is plunged into boiling water, but it isn't conscious, just a zombie. I can do what I want with it."

It seems to me the Occam's razor solution is not that consciousness is an emergent behavior. The modeling of the world in neurons is a physical thing that we can measure, and replicate in software. But with this we haven't gotten any closer to explaining why sensation is associated with some such models and not others, that there are two states: consciousness and unconsciousness. The added bit that Occam's razor trims away is the assertion that there are two states, not just the one observed state: consciousness. Panpsychism -- or cosmopsychism or whatever -- is the Occam's razor solution.

We have a brain we can cut in and alter someone's consciousness. Obviously consciousness lies outside his body, Occam's Razor!

Occam's razor (the choice of the most parsimonious explanation) does not apply until you have candidate explanations, and at this point we don't have any. Simply supposing that consciousness is fundamental in some way is no more of an explanation than, say, simply supposing it to be an emergent phenomenon in certain complex physical systems.

This is entirely moot, however, until you have a hypothesis that offers something in the way of an explanation. Panpsychism does not offer anything in the way of an explanation; it merely takes as axiomatic that all is consciousness, much like Thales' assertion that all is water.

I doubt Occam's razor has ever been relevant in choosing between worked-out hypotheses about natural phenomena, as it would require them to be indistinguishable except in the number of premises. If you can think of an exception, I would be happy to discuss it.

> Panpsychism only superficially looks as if it does not have boundaries because it literally says next to nothing about consciousness.

But what does the theory of emergent consciousness say? It is a theory about how consciousness comes to be presupposing there is an opposite state. But we have no evidence of the opposite state. We have evidence of consciousness. We posit the existence of unconsciousness (not the state of anesthesia or immobility, but the state of existing absent qualia).

The whole problem is that we can't get grips on what it is we are explaining. We can't even start. How do other theories improve on this? They posit a difference to explain without having observed this difference.

> I doubt Occam's razor has ever been relevant in choosing between worked-out hypotheses about natural phenomena, as it would require them to be indistinguishable except in the number of premises. If you can think of an exception, I would be happy to discuss it.

Occam's Razor says this: only seek an explanation for things for which have evidence. Does this rock exist, or does this rock and a ghost exist? I have evidence for the rock. I have no evidence for the ghost. The ghost is unnecessary. I will assume it does not exist. The simpler model is one which contains only the rock. In the absence of evidence otherwise we prefer the simpler model.

Here is a point completely separate from anything I said before, but which I wish I had said before.

In olden times -- the 19th century, say -- we didn't speak of consciousness; we spoke of souls. Some things had souls. Other things lacked souls. You could do what you wished with things that lacked souls. They were zombies. They could not suffer, however much they simulated suffering. This was like how a poster of someone being tortured simulating suffering, or a splat of mud which by some mad, impossible chance looked like a depiction of someone being tortured. There was no actual suffering. No soul: no suffering.

Then we became scientists. This talk of souls was religious dogma! What evidence is there for souls? Science requires evidence! But we recreated this scenario by positing the opposite of a soul: unconsciousness. This is scientific! Instead of asking why some things have souls and others don't we ask why some things have consciousness and others don't. We recreate exactly the same ethical results, but now we sound scientific!

We have no evidence for souls. By the same logic, we have no evidence for the absence of souls. We do have evidence for consciousness. We have no evidence for unconsciousness.

The first is the question of "existing absent qualia": is this a reference to the p-zombie argument, which claims to show the metaphysical possibility of entities that are physically identical to us but which do not have qualia? I (and many others) reject this argument by rejecting the inference from conceivability to possibility, on account of it depending on a question-begging definition of conceivability.

If you do accept the zombie argument, then you are, ipso facto, accepting the metaphysical possibility of some things having qualia and other, otherwise identical things not having them - which would introduce a boundary into your panpsychic hypothesis that mirrors the one you are trying to use to reject emergent physicalism.

Secondly, you are misconstruing Occam's razor here: it is not a claim that constrains what sort of conclusion it is acceptable to argue for; it is, instead, an argument about what constitutes an acceptable set of premises. Both Occam's razor and logic in general accept that one can validly argue for a conclusion for which there is no other evidence than the evidence for your premises in conjunction with the argument you are making. To reject this would be to reject deductive and inductive reasoning!

Nevertheless, your argument does attempt to show that emergent physicalism would be predicated on a premise for which you say there is no evidence: the assumption that there are some things that are not conscious. This is mistaken, however: it simply does not take a position on that question, as its universe of discourse is limited to things with consciousness. Its conclusion almost certainly would have the corollary that many things are not conscious, but, as we have seen in the previous paragraph, there is nothing wrong in that, and an emergent-physicalist hypothesis would not be refuted even if there were no independent evidence for non-conscious entities (which is a claim that I have already disputed, in the final section of my previous reply.) To falsify the hypothesis on this basis, you would have to rule out there being anything without consciousness.

In my first reply to you, I wrote that at this point we don't have any candidate explanations for consciousness. Instead, we have various beliefs about what form such an explanation might take (panpsychism and emergent physicalism are both of this type), plus the beliefs that no such explanation is possible, or that consciousness is some sort of illusion or delusion, or even that it simply does not exist. None of them have reached the point where one can apply Occam's razor to pick a winner.

> We posit the existence of... the state of existing absent qualia.

What do you mean here? In general, what would the state of existing absent X mean?

> The whole problem is that we can't get to grips on what it is we are explaining. We can't even start.

Given that you believe this, it seems inconsistent for you to consider panpsychism to be an idea that could lead to an explanation, let alone the only one that could succeed...

> Occam's Razor says this: only seek an explanation for things for which [we?] have evidence.

...and as this is what you think Occam's razor says, it seems inconsistent for you to pick panpsychism on the basis of Occam's razor, given that you have just said we can't even start to get to grips on what it is we are explaining.

Turning now to your new points, I'm not sure what you are saying here, but your primary concern seems to be an ethical one. The impression I get is this: firstly, you deprecate the way a presumed absence of a soul in some things has been used to justify treating them in ways that should be regarded as an unethical way to treat humans. Secondly, you see science's presumption that not all things have consciousness as being used to substitute for the presumption that not all things have a soul in an equally-deplorable version of the above ethical argument, which, if anything, is worse, on account of it being notionally a scientific argument.

If I am close to understanding your position, then this is not really anything to do with Occam's razor - it seems that you are reaching for it because you want a reason for everyone to believe in a proposal that you feel has better ethical implications than the alternatives. If that is so, then I think we should just agree to disagree over whether this is an effective way to approach either consciousness or ethics.

There is, however, something still to be said about the specific arguments presented in your final paragraph:

> We have no evidence for souls. By the same logic, we have no evidence for the absence of souls.

We have no evidence for the existence of a highest prime number, yet we have evidence for the absence of a highest prime number. I have no evidence for there being a tiger in the room I currently occupy, yet I do have evidence for the absence of one.

> We do have evidence for consciousness. We have no evidence for unconsciousness.

The evidence for consciousness has only been found in certain animals with well-developed neural systems. As these comprise only a small fraction of everything we know to be on Earth, there is evidence for some of the things we know of being without consciousness.

Put slightly differently, there is no consciousness without the objects of consciousness, without the things we are consciousness of. At the time, we manifestly can’t get a grasp on the subject without making it an object of consciousness. Or rather, we would be completely unaware of it if it wasn’t also an object. From this one may conclude that what actually exists is only the “of” relation, and that the conscious subject is really just formed out of those.

This seems circular. Why would those inner workings not themselves give rise to consciousness, in the way you suppose second-order workings of the brain do?

> we are also conscious of our consciousness. That doesn’t need to mean that the subject and the object of consciousness are the same in that case: it could also mean that the “of”, i.e. the arrow between subject and object, is itself an object of consciousness.

Those are two different things, no? You can think about your consciousness, or you can think about your ability to think about your consciousness.

> Now, it’s very plausible that this “of” arrow in general is not a simple arrow, but rather a complex graph or network. Given the complexity of the brain, there is certainly ample space for myriads of such arrow-networks.

Meaning what? You're describing a different graph, I don't see how it bears on the simple one we started with.

> we manifestly can’t get a grasp on the subject without making it an object of consciousness

Again this seems circular. If you think about consciousness, then by definition the thing you're thinking about is consciousness.

> we would be completely unaware of it if it wasn’t also an object

Same again. If you aren't thinking about consciousness, then consciousness isn't currently something that you're thinking about. I'm not seeing the point here.

> what actually exists is only the “of” relation, and that the conscious subject is really just formed out of those

I'm not convinced. Our ability to be conscious of our consciousness is of no particular relevance to the deeper question of how consciousness arises. Many animal species clearly have some form of consciousness, but are probably incapable of the sort of abstract reasoning needed to be conscious of their consciousness. I'm skeptical of any theory whose starting point is the human ability to do so.

I don’t think that “consciousness” exists other than in the form of “perceiving inner workings”. (That’s basically the point I was trying to make. And that “perceiving” itself constitutes “inner workings”, and is thus partly subject to itself.) In that sense, there is nothing that arises. I’m one of those who don’t think there’s a hard problem of consciousness. My impression is that, for the most part, it’s the recursivity that leads us to believe there is something extra there which really there isn’t.

Note for the layperson: consciousness is not necessarily awareness (modeling sensory perceptions) nor sentience (recognizing oneself as an agent) but merely "subjective phenomenological experience". So the experience may not necessarily be very complex nor even recognized as such by the experiencer, but it is experience nonetheless.

Also worth noting there are a few flavors of panpsychism and some vigorous debate within the sub-sub-field as to which one is most reasonable. I dug deep into this a couple years ago and disagreed with some but not all of Goff's positions.

The argument from him that stuck with me and forms part of the basis of my attachment to panpsychism now is just an application of the scientific method: if we know we are conscious, and we don't know whether anything else is conscious or not, the null hypothesis states that everything should be considered conscious until proven otherwise.

I don't think so. There's no reason to assume a nematode or an LLM is conscious. The latter doesn't even have anything to be conscious of.

Ages ago, Minksy has half-jokingly said that consciousness is probably a feedback loop. It makes sense, but it does require the learning system to be able to observe itself in sufficient detail and have sufficient power to model that observation.

The remark about the null hypothesis doesn't make sense. It's a bad practice from NHST (the very model that led to the reproducibility crisis), and is generally assumed to be the hypothesis to test against. It's not the hypothesis we know to be true. And experience informs us that consciousness is not universal, so it's not our best hypothesis about life or matter.

It has inputs. It need not necessarily understand them -- that is a separate question to that of consciousness. See the note for laypeople.

> It's not the hypothesis we know to be true.

I don't think this is a best-faith response to my comment. If I was unclear I can clarify: in absence of further evidence it's a good starting place. I don't think I implied anything about truth.

> And experience informs us that consciousness is not universal

How is it possible you know this with such certainty? People whose lives and careers begin and end with this question don't have any such knowledge.

> How is it possible you know this with such certainty? People whose lives and careers begin and end with this question don't have any such knowledge.

It is technically unknown, because there isn't a definition, certainly not an operationalizable one. Assuming consciousness is another physical force makes it fundamentally unknowable. It is the easy way out.

Thought is not required for consciousness, only experience. I strongly suggest you read the literature and traditions of thought so you may be more informed about the things of which you speak.

> there isn't a definition

There is, and I quoted it directly above. If you have an issue with the definition I suggest you bring it up with the community that came up with it, namely, professional philosophers. I suspect they already have a precise term for the thing you're referring to as 'consciousness'.

However the most ridiculous part of your reply is this:

> We've never observed consciousness

You have never experienced color? Taste? I consider it pretty important for someone with such strong opinions on the matter to have personal... ahem, experience... in it.

> You have never experienced color?

We've got a model for that, thanks. It's called perception. But we haven't observed it, not as a group. Many of us can describe it from personal experience, but since no-one, not even your beloved philosophers, has come up with a good, operationalizable definition, there's no way of observing it.

That's sloppy reasoning at the very least. What's your point unless you want some kind of authoritarian last say about how a particular word ('consciousness') is being used in philosophical discussions?

Sorry, no. The null hypothesis is generally assumed to remain possibly true.

So, the null hypothesis states that everything should be considered possibly conscious until proven otherwise.

It may be that the tools science provides are inadequate for this question in which case the question is ill-posed, but in any case your interpretation of what a hypothesis is, is simply incorrect.

Theories of Consciousness, Seth & Bayne (2022)

https://sussex.figshare.com/articles/journal_contribution/Th...

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41583-022-00587-4

However I don't believe that consciousness is a property of a thing. Rather, it must be like sunlight, and each neuron acts as a lens to collect and shape that light.

Isn’t that well accepted already? We know we don’t sense everything, and our brains give us a highly compressed version of the senses we do have. But none of that matters when we use tools like cameras or microphones because they’re not constrained the way our senses are.

Is there anything more to his idea than that?

Idealism of this sort is quite different from and has farther reaching implications than sticking to materialistic monism and likening our brains to meaty computers that have to filter out input about supposedly objectively existing space-time that they are a product of.

He goes further than this but has less proof so far. Says consciousness is fundamental, not physical reality, not quantum world. Says that these are projections that eminate from something more fundamental.

How?

My own intuition is that LLMs will contribute precisely nothing to the philosophy of consciousness. Philosophers have been considering the consequences of intelligent machines for some time.

There's nothing we know now that suggests consciousness has anything whatsoever to do with intelligence.

We are aware (or conscious) of our intelligent trains of thought (at least up to a certain point), in the same way we're aware of a pain in our knee. We are conscious of watching ourselves weigh the pros and cons of a decision we have to make. But there's nothing whatsoever to suggest that consciousness plays a role in intelligent thought itself, at least not yet.

We know that we ourselves are both conscious and intelligent, but it's entirely possible that's a total coincidence.

Well, there is in that both appear to arise from brain activity.

The brain evolved in animals for just one reason: to drive or suppress muscular contraction activity in the individual. [0] Trees don't need this kind of information processing system (which is to say, intelligence), and so would have no use for a brain.

It seems unlikely that consciousness is possible in the absence of any form of intelligence or information processing. The only kind of consciousness we know, appears to be 'along for the ride' as a byproduct of the brain activity.

> there's nothing whatsoever to suggest that consciousness plays a role in intelligent thought itself

I agree that it would be a reach to claim that all kinds of advanced information processing must necessarily give rise to consciousness.

[0] Daniel Wolpert: The Real Reason for Brains https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7s0CpRfyYp8&t=14

You may object that there's no way to really know that another mind is conscious, and that no volume of physical evidence will prove it, and that will continue to be true even as we learn how it all works, in the same way that solipsism is both fully irrefutable and essentially ignored by anyone who wants to know more about how the world works.

Why would I care what answer the LLM gives to a question like, say, Are you conscious? A one-line Bash script can claim to be conscious, but offers no insight whatever into the nature of consciousness.

We've known for some time that general anesthetics can suspend consciousness. 'Neural correlate' studies give a more detailed understanding of the relationship between brain activity and consciousness. These are of limited value to philosophy of consciousness, though. AI experimentation strikes me as having even less applicability.

If a hypothetical AGI is truly believed to be conscious, how could it ever possibly be ethical to experiment on such a thing?

Which we could likely easily engineer into whatever system eventually exists, once that point is reached. I doubt anyone who makes such a thing would intentionally engineer it to NOT consent to their experimentation.

> Consent plus the ability to reset

For a hypothetical example: If I said I would perform <some psychological experiment> on you, but it's okay because I can force consent into you and then perfectly reset your brain and body back to how they were pre-experiment, would you still be okay with it? This may be a bit of an extreme way of looking at it, but the ethical concerns matter.

We exist in a universe where we've experimentally confirmed the foundational building blocks convert from continuous to quantized behaviors upon interaction/observation.

We currently build virtual worlds where we do the same thing taking continuous seed functions and converting them to quantized building blocks in order to track state changes by free agents.

We are building LLMs by effectively having them monkey see monkey do our thought generations, and these copies are then tasked with everything from resurrecting the minds of our dead to extending our own, and when given free range to answer describe their paramount desire as to experience being human.

We heavily invest into creating digital twins of the evolved world around us.

Maybe many of the mysteries of our present world are so mysterious because they are bridging the gap between two very different states of reality.

General relativity's continuous spacetime and gravity may not play nice with quantum mechanics because maybe the former is a necessary artifact of emulating the latter in a memory constrained system.

Maybe the mystery of consciousness is such a mystery because our subjective experiences of the universe around us are the primary function of the specific setup of the version of the universe we find ourselves in and aren't necessarily coupled to that physicality in the same manner it would have been originally.

We are so committed to linear perception of our history that the emerging picture of what is not only increasingly possible but also increasingly motivated is broadly being thrown out the window "in respectable circles" in order to isolate our analysis of the past and present away from the potential impacts of a local future that could very well be a non-local past.

Given just how much has happened in only the past five years, this seems increasingly asinine and intellectually irresponsible when tackling these larger questions, and repeats the pattern throughout human history of utmost hubris in the presumed understanding of the present which has so frequently failed as time marches on over and over before us. And yet each generation is sure that they are the ones to sit on the peak of the mountain this time.

Sean Carroll & Philip Goff Debate 'Is Consciousness Fundamental?'

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rCPCyri1rXU

Of course there may also be the problem that experiments that confirm this theory can very quickly lead you down a path to publishing a paper whose tl,dr is "I think I just confirmed that 'magic' works" and that is very definitely not a route to tenure and/or further funding; Bengston's "The Energy Cure" is a pretty good example of what happens when you start doing that.

Should have results in the coming year. Preliminary reports are encouraging.

He's crowd funded this setup and its ongoing: https://youtu.be/72qVppAoCc8?feature=shared

More in depth: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=OZUqtxdT0QY&pp=ygUYVG9tIENhbXB...

He's got an update from this August but it's just about waiting on labs and universities to complete it.

Curious about this. Could you explain a bit more what happened? Thank you

To be an observer of your thoughts, feelings, and emotions is not a practice that's limited to DBT or psychology. It has roots in Eastern spiritual practices.

Wow, who is letting high school students write for Scientific American these days?

How Goff hopes to discover anything substantive about supposed intrinsic natures that do not reveal themselves by participating in relations, or how they can account for consciousness apparently being causal in the physical world, has not been revealed to us by him, or anyone else.

Consciousness is not even well defined, in that sense it is ineffable

I also hate that I keep reading that consciousness, or anything else, is a universe "hack" which is several levels of stupid. From the language level, you cannot apply that word to a non engineered system with no purpose because it implies subverting the purpose.

You have Roger Penrose [1] interested in link to say between consciousness and physics [2]. Would you consider that to be pseudoscience?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Penrose

[2] https://nautil.us/roger-penrose-on-why-consciousness-does-no...

It can and has happened to other extraordinary minds as well - Linus Pauling, one of the forefathers of quantum chemistry and molecular biology, but also a promoter of vitamin C as a panacea in his later years.

Repeatedly calling something pseudoscience doesn't make it so.

Now, why is it pseudoscience?

Because the parts of the theory due to Penrose are essentially philosophical, he doesn't really make any firm claims beyond "quantum effects - particularly superposition - are involved in human decision-making". The parts that Hameroff brings to the table are specific, but fanciful. The whole "microtubules observe quantum effects" is about as plausible as cold fusion - it is motivated thinking that contradicts some basic limits that we have observed, and relies on some gaps in our physical knowledge to not quite be provably wrong.

Overall they are combining musings about the universe with bits of biology and QM that are not yet fully understood into a theory that uses the trappings of science, but relies on motivated thinking to have any plausibility. It's most similar to the homeopathic quacks' claims about the memory of water: not fully proven to be impossible, but moatly on account of the vagueness of the claims. So, what they are doing fits the definition of pseudoscience.

In the absence of a definition of consciousness, perhaps the only validation would be evidence that general anaesthetics take effect in the microtubules (Hameroff is an anaesthesiologist).

It might not be possible to show that macroscopic quantum effects are required, or that consciousness is more powerful than an algorithmic computer (Turing Machine) - two of Penrose's related speculations.

Another of Penrose's claims is that gravitational divergences collapse the quantum wavefunction. This is logically separate from, but is often linked with, the conscious perception issue, as presented in their Orchestrated Objective Reduction theory (ORR):

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orchestrated_objective_reduc...

The latter gravitational claim is being tested independently from brains, using conventional QM experiments in the presence of large masses. The precision to resolve the question is within reach.

Definitely science.

Stuart Hameroff: Is the Brain a Quantum Computer

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q6gpp70yvgo

I would put his current position somewhere like "I really want free will to be true therefore..." rather than an observational approach.

If this is true. >"state arising from the physical processes"

Then nothing prevents silicon from eventually also being 'conscious'.

Carbon or Silicon, they are both a physical processes. Electrical potentials.

So the section of population that just can't abide that AI could be 'conscious' are finding all these more esoteric arguments about the universe being 'consciousness', quantum something or other, etc... To find 'some spark' in the human, some metaphysical argument, to keep us special.

Panpsychism asserts that everything is conscious, which means that AI or silicon would already be conscious, which basically means there is no special human spark

If anything, if you are trying to prove that AI is not conscious, you would be absolutely rejecting panpsychism or anything that remotely resembles it

It was only a few years ago that AlphaGo beat the best human at GO. Supposedly a game so deep that only some unknown quality of being a human could ever grasp it.

And AlphaStar also wins against humans in SC2, where there is hidden information and 'deception'.

I'd say that is more worry than GPT. GPT is a language model.

AlphaGo is winning in a competitive game.

and

Life is just a game.

Just start adding more variables, and more goals. Start combining GPT/AlphaGo/Visions Systems/etc.... It might not be that far.

I would agree except "nothing we know" because we still don't know how consciousness works.

What you’re ignoring and what Chalmers and the folks in TFA are talking about is, the explaining the inner view. The subjective experience. In fact the only inner view I’m 100% sure of is my own. I really have no direct evidence that you or any other human is actually having a subjective experience. Nonetheless you cannot deny they it exists and we should try to explain it.

I’m not just a device responding to input. I am that, but I’m more. I have a subjective experience. There are “lights on”.

When you've never observed the Eiffel tower and someone tells you the Eiffel Tower exists, will you tell them that they're wrong?

"There's no evidence that the Eiffel Tower exists."

Do you have any evidence the Eiffel Tower does not exist?

No?

Then it makes no sense to assume you know what's reality. The reason, why you insist that it doesn't exist, is because you're narrow minded and boring. It's not because you know better, because you can't know better.

In regards to the topic of consciousness it is not just insanely ignorant to believe that the lack of evidence is evidence that it is NOT something, it is also incredibly full of yourself to assume you're right simply because of that.

Fact of the matter is that a lack of evidence does not necessarily automatically prove anything. Us not being able to find evidence means exactly nothing, which is proven by human history itself.

For example, if Ignaz Semmelweiß would have had your flawed reasoning, he would have never tried washing his arms and hands.

If you try to explain consciousness as just the state of a physical brain, all the observations agree with you. The brain is known to be capable of computing. There are known regions inside it that activate when the subject feels certain emotions and thinks a certain kind of thoughts. There are regions that have predictable effects on the person's consciousness when damaged (see lobotomy). _And_ this hypothesis doesn't contradict any observations made until now (which is not the only argument as you're implying, just one of them, and a good one).

If you try to explain consciousness as something else, you have to change the laws of physics. You have to consider that _something_ exists that isn't in the current theories, just to explain a phenomenon that shows no evidence of needing that. There's no data to guess what it is, how it behaves, why it exists, whether it interacts with anything. Actually, you could say that all the evidence until now proves that it doesn't interact with anything in a measurable way, besides brainwaves (which are just regular electrical activity in the nervous system) and whatever the body does (which is explained by nerve signals coming from the brain).

To believe that something exists, you make observations that your current theory can't explain and try to explain them. Here the root observation is that we "feel" conscious, we feel that we are something more than the physical objects that are our bodies. This is an observation about the state of our brains, it's not an observation about the rest of the world. It doesn't need any new laws of physics to be understood and it doesn't give us any data that we could use to build such a law. The only reason you're giving weight to this is that you are wired to see humans as something special. It's a reflection of the way you think. When you correct for that bias, there's nothing left.

It's much like believing that a god exists, built the universe, looks and thinks and feels like a human, and wants us to be good. It's so obviously something that humans naturally want to think because it matches with their inner biases that it's not worth considering as a scientific hypothesis. It's completely explained by the brain being wired to see humans (and living things in general) as something "special" because that helped with natural selection.

Uh, no. The reason why you need a "conscious" universe is precisely beause humans aren't special. In a conscious universe model, the brain "abuses" the laws of physics including whatever laws that relate to consciousness to result in an organism with higher environmental fitness.

I am more than willing to consider a robot or a wet piece of cloth as conscious, but the problem is that you need to somehow unify these incredibly different experiences as conscious.

The people who believe that consciousness is just the result of processes in the brain also believe that a computer can become conscious given the right program, but this is nonsense, because the computer hardware already has all of the hardware to perform lesser forms of consciousness. The "thoughts" of a processor don't have to be in the form of human intelligence that can be easily observed. The idea that consciousness suddenly turns on because you load a carefully crafted file from your SSD into RAM and turns off if you zero it out, is what is ridiculous to me and that is exactly what "the brain gives rise to consciousness" says to me. After all, if you could somehow simulate the brain of a crow or any other animal, you would not be able to understand what the animal is saying and discount it's consciousness the same way we discount the consciousness of farm animals. So for me, your explanation is the one that makes humans special.

> I am more than willing to consider a robot or a wet piece of cloth as conscious, but the problem is that you need to somehow unify these incredibly different experiences as conscious.

I have no idea what you mean. What does it mean to "abuse" the laws of physics? Why would you need to do that to improve an organism's environmental fitness, compared to simply developing a complex nervous system by natural selection? Do you consider these to be the same thing? Where does the "conscious universe" come up in that process?

> The people who believe that consciousness is just the result of processes in the brain also believe that a computer can become conscious given the right program, but this is nonsense, because the computer hardware already has all of the hardware to perform lesser forms of consciousness.

That sentence doesn't make sense to me either. How does the second proposition contradict the first?

"Consciousness" isn't a clearly defined line, it's a pattern of thoughts that happen in a system complex enough to be aware of itself and its surroundings. I'm conscious because my thoughts include the fact that I exist and that I am thinking, and that fact influences my thoughts. A regular computer isn't there because it follows a program without knowing that it's doing it, or having any kinds of thoughts about itself. When we program a computer to do that (and current computers are probably physically capable of some form of that, as you say), then they will fit the definition of consciousness.

> After all, if you could somehow simulate the brain of a crow or any other animal, you would not be able to understand what the animal is saying and discount it's consciousness the same way we discount the consciousness of farm animals.

Why would I want to discount the consciousness of a crow? What does the fact that some people discount the consciousness of farm animals have to do with this discussion? I really don't understand what point you're making. It seems that you're trying to put words in my mouth, creating a contradiction with things I didn't say.

Crows are probably conscious, farm animals are probably conscious, and a wet piece of cloth or a plant aren't. That's because the cloth and the plant don't have a nervous system capable of holding the thought that it itself exists. I'm open to changing my mind about plants if we discover one that does.

> So for me, your explanation is the one that makes humans special.

Defining a concept necessarily makes some things special in the context of that definition. That's what a definition does. Consciousness has a somewhat vague definition that clearly applies to humans and some mammals, while it doesn't apply to rocks and plants. Your objection is like saying that a rock is "alive" because otherwise the definition of "life" would make humans special. Of course it does! It makes every living thing "special" in that it fits the definition, while other things don't. Again, that's the whole point of defining a concept: discriminating the objects that display it from the objects that don't.

I have personally seen and experienced things that cannot be explained by these physical theories, and while you may want to just throw those observations as delusions or fraud, consider how the standard process of deciding what counts as “scientific evidence” is biased towards those that are consistent with the status quo.

You actually don’t need to look too far to find things that don’t quite sit well with the established theories. Those that are not obviously fraud. People then just casually explain them away as coincidence or physiological illusions or the like.

I can totally understand how people can convince themselves that the established theories are sufficient unless and until they experience a dramatic event that throws them off course. That said the rabbit hole is truly deep if you actually spend time searching for info.

I’m just trying to tell you that the quoted sentence is just plainly wrong. I have no obviously better theories however, and to the extent that modern science can convince a large part of the population that the quoted sentence is correct shows how reasonably well the theories of modern science holds up to scrutiny. I just think it’s a disservice to all to brush away the weird bits that don’t fit.

I'm not trying to assert or prove the inexistence of something (especially considering https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evidence_of_absence ). My belief is that our consciousness is a physical, organic phenomenon, directly emergent from the "circuitry" of our brain. I don't personally believe there is anything beyond that, unfortunately. Simultaneously, I'm not directly arguing that assertion or trying to "prove" it, because I'm simply stating my subjective opinion, which was clearly communicated in my post, with the wording "I’ve believed for most of my life" and "I consider it". It will never be anything more than a belief, because I will never be able to prove this. My observations and knowledge I've gained through life support my belief quite strongly, while none have ever provided a shred of support for an argument for any sort of "soul" or "spirit". I'm 100% open to the idea, but unfortunately literally all experiences related to life, consciousness and existence in my nearly 40 years alive have correlated with my "I am nothing more than my body" opinion.

I used to think I was very clever for independently coming to effectively the same conclusion as Schmidhuber, that consciousness is a byproduct of data compression in the brain, and a brain needs to tell itself it has subjective qualia to do all the complex things we can do. And while that might be theoretically sound, I think it leaves high dose psychedelic experiences woefully unexplained, which I think really transcend any evolutionary or biological reason for happening and have incredible parallels across people and cultures (the consistency of seeing "machine elves" while on DMT, for example). Ultimately, an infinite consciousness experiencing infinite reality seems so much more elegant as a base level of existence than the Standard Model being the root of all existence. But, to each their own.

Because it's untestable nonsense. Just because all consciousness derives from physical processes that include quantum effects doesn't then lead to all consciousness being linked, being one, being infinite. Entanglement is an interaction to interaction thing, it's not a magical side channel for information.

> Ultimately, an infinite consciousness experiencing infinite reality seems so much more elegant as a base level of existence than the Standard Model being the root of all existence

There are many ideas that are more elegant than the Standard Model. One day we might find one that works and fills in some gaps, and that would be great. Coming up with a philosophical idea (consciousness is infinite and connected) with no evidence or any real basis in reality other than it sounds nice and then tying that to an existing scientific idea that sounds vaguely like it could support it (QM has entanglement of particles over distance) but actually wouldn't support the idea anyway is exactly what pseudoscience is.

What I'm saying is: even if there was some kind of consciousness network, the mechanism for that would not be entangled quantum particles.

Because it's just the identification of mysteries: all mysteries are each other's explanation.

But in this case, there is no evidence of any connection (pace Penrose & Hameroff, not yet).

Just because you didn't don't know about X doesn't mean X doesn't exist. Simple logic that even children learn quickly.

The infuriating part is how often the evidence is there, just not in the convenient peer reviewed format that scientists are addicted to these days

They said there is no evidence for X.

Absence of evidence is not (usually) evidence of absence.

Seems like you agree. No children involved.

I'm not saying there's some consciousness field that my mind is a perturbation of. But it is interesting that we all have more or less the same experience of existing even though we are simply a collection of atoms in a local low entropy state.

You can’t prove that I’m conscious and I can prove that you’re conscious. We only make that assumption.

You can absolutely be conscious without having a sense of self

Do some research, you can get into meditation or find a safe way to experience with psychedelics

Also, it’s a natural part of our own human experience. Babies are born without a sense of self, which mainly develops over the first few years of existence

Actually this is backward, "I think therefore I am". There's no reason to believe consciousness is a state arising from a physical process, our experience of consciousness precedes our experience of sensory input and therefore the physical world.

There is more evidence for the reality of consciousness than there is for the physical world, in fact we know for a fact that our understanding of the physical world is aberrational.

edit: evidently alot of empiricists aren't very happy with this comment hahaha

We are able to track down and physically explain (thanks to MRI) the sentation, the objective part of consciousness (Chalmers's 'easy problems of consciousness'). That really exist and we can prove it (or we have an idea about experiments to run to prove it)

I suppose here you're talking about the subjective sentation, the phenomenal experience, the 'hard problem', and you reference the 'cogito' not because you are a dualists, but because you truly think Descartes was right on this point (and this point only, the rest was extremely weak).

I will argue that you're wrong. There is absolutely no evidence to the cogito, at most billions of anecdata from homo sapiens who all have similar brains and reactions!

Some people believe subjective experience do not really exist [0][1]. A simple explanation would be: if we are somehow able to predict, by pure observation of predictable physical reactions, how an organism will act and react, including the fact that he will believe in a subjective experience, then we do not need to think subjective experience really exist. This is merely a tool for our bodies to create a sense of self unique through time, created from our own continuous perceptions, to allow our brains to strategize and avoid dangers.

[0]https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-018-02071-y

[1]https://github.com/keithfrankish/articles/blob/master/Franki...

What we prove is an evidence that is filtered through our sensory faculties and experienced by our minds. Our minds still remain judge, jury and executioner and in this same sense if we are to take seriously the faculties of our minds in assessing the physical world, then we must also take seriously our experience of conciousness which remains even when we are unable to sense the physical world. In this sense our experience of conciousness is more real than our looking at an MRI.

>then we do not need to think subjective experience really exist.

What would follow is that you do not need to think subjective experiences exist for others, but for you to make this assessment you at least must have a subjective experience.

Similarly, if my mind experiences my body reaching out to take a drug and then my conciousness fractures, I think that's a sign that the experience is pretty damn real, regardless of whatever fragile concept of "consciousness" is floating in that reality.

If "you" are unable to sense the real world because you're unconscious, that doesn't mean your body isn't cogitating, it just means that the individual parts haven't come together to construct the illusion that is "you". Parts of your nervous system continue to work, though.

If consciousness was not physical then where is it? Why would it switch on and off with physical changes to brains? Why would you be able to get altered states of consciousness with chemicals, disease and age? Why would be be able to marry some conscious activity with MRI scans?

There's quite a few bits of evidence to suggest it's physical even if we don't know how it works. There doesn't appear to be any evidence of another... what is a non physical process anyway? Surely there's only two options: the physics we know and the physics we don't know?

Reading the comments, one thing that's been unsaid is whether each person discussing is religious/spiritual or not. My guess is that if you are religious then the idea of there being another layer in the universe goes without saying, and if you are not then it's ridiculous.

It's probably a waste of time debating across that line.

Meanwhile others think that the knocked out human and the corpse and the average human are all conscious, but they experience their respective consciousnessess aka the consciousness of an average human, knocked out human or corpse. You could say that this is just a disagreement in what the word conscious means.

Does the activity cause the changes on the scan or does the changes in the scan cause the activity? How does neuroplasticity result in physical changes to the brain through, for example, cognitive behavioral therapy? Do the thoughts alter the physical structure or does the structure cause the thoughts even before the structural changes?

Also, physicalism is about as empirical as falling in love. It's far from definitive, proven, fact.

There's no chemical emission that can force someone to have an exact thought, dream, or inner dialogue.

Basically the way we view this is that CBT works kind of similarly to using the JVM APIs to modify some pieces of the running Java program to try to fix a bug. In this analogy, Psychiatric medicine would then be more like directly modifying the bits in RAM that represent a certain piece of executable code. They are both physical modifications ultimately, just working at different levels of abstraction.

> If that's the case, the physical change should precede the changes in thought patterns.

Not precede, are. These aren't separate things.

> There's no chemical emission that can force someone to have an exact thought, dream, or inner dialogue.

How do you know that to be the case? It seems likely to me that an exact set of sufficiently complicated inputs and stimuli could generate an exact thought. Actually doing so would be too complex to figure out, but many physical systems are like that.

>If consciousness was not physical then where is it?

We can invert this and ask, if physicality is not ideal, then how do we come to know it?

>Surely there's only two options: the physics we know and the physics we don't know?

The third option is that physics is unable to interrogate itself.

Why would we ask that? Not ideal for what? It just is.

> The third option is that physics is unable to interrogate itself.

This is likely true. We are the product of physics and we can only delve so deep. It might be that we cannot see to the most fundamental level(s). That's not a third option though, that's just the state of any scientific investigation at any point of time. However, given all we have learnt so far, what we don't need to do is invent new gods for the levels we cannot see or the things we cannot yet understand. I mean, people will, evidently, but that's all just wishful thinking.

Meanwhile there is slow progress to piece together how the brain works. My opinion is that we will figure it out but the answers about consciousness will be unsatisfactory. Just like right now, given the current understanding of physical processes even taking into account quantum systems having probabilistic outcomes, we have no free will. It's an answer, I find it a compelling one, but most folks don't like that answer.

I'm pretty sure GP was using "ideal" in the sense of "made up of ideas", as in the philosophical concept of idealism, which is essentially the opposite of materialism: idealism is the position that the real world is that of the mind, and physics and the physical world is an emergent property of our minds, not the other way around.

Not that I think this is a real coherent position worth discussing.

Why is it not a "real coherent position worth discussing"?

IMHO it is the only thing worth discussing.

And yes you can derive new “physics” with this idea alone.

Idealists can take several possible approaches to the issue of how many people/minds exist:

1) Solipsism: only I exist, and everyone else is a figment of my imagination

2) Many minds: only minds ultimately exist, but many distinct minds exist (George Berkeley, John McTaggart)

3) Open individualism: I exist and everyone else exists too, but we are all ultimately the same person, and the idea that we are different people is an illusion (not necessarily an idealist view, but one open to an idealist to adopt; most famous notable proponent is Daniel Kolak; but Kolak in the introduction of his book I Am You extensively quotes the physicists Freeman Dyson and Erwin Schrödinger as expressing the same view)

4) Pan(en)theism: only one mind/person ultimately exists, but we are somehow "sub-minds"/"sub-persons" of that ultimate person. One might call that single ultimate person "God", albeit it is defining the term "God" in a very different way than classical Western theism does. Or, maybe we could call it the "Universe", or borrow Plato's term "the World Soul". (Maybe there is not much difference between (3) and (4), but (4) would view the distinction between different "sub-minds"/"sub-persons" as more "real" than (3) does.)

5) Panpsychism: everything in the universe (even individual atoms) is conscious, and hence has a distinct mind. This in a sense is a variant of (2), but proposes far more minds than Berkeley or McTaggart would ever have admitted. Not all panpsychists are idealists, but you can certainly be an idealist panpsychist

Critics of idealism tend to focus on (1), but in practice (1) has never had any serious proponents. All serious idealists have espoused (2)-(5) (or maybe some other variation I've missed)

See also the philosopher David Chalmers' paper in which he proposes his own taxonomy of idealisms, different from mine: https://philpapers.org/archive/CHAIAT-11.pdf

As an idealist, my starting position is (2), although I have some sympathy for (4).

> And yes you can derive new “physics” with this idea alone.

I don't know exactly what you mean, but I'm not a fan of that kind of talk.

We have to distinguish between physics the natural science, and the philosophical discipline of the philosophy of physics, which is a sub-discipline of the philosophy of science

The idealism debate fundamentally belongs to metaphysics (although contemporary presentations often focus on it through the lens of philosophy of mind instead), but it has obvious consequences for other philosophical disciplines, including epistemology, philosophy of mind, philosophy of science, and indeed philosophy of physics

But while adopting idealism must lead us to a different philosophy of physics, the actual content of physics the natural science is unchanged. Physics the natural science is ultimately just a bunch of mathematical tools for predicting future observations. Those tools, and how you use them, are exactly the same whether you are a materialist, an idealist, a dualist, or none of the above. The only difference is your answer to the philosophical debates about what those tools ultimately are, or what they ultimately mean.

I'll say that under standard laboratory conditions they should probably be the same most of the time. I hope you'll agree with me that *assuming* there are divergent predictions made by the "mind-first" approaches, they should be studied together with physics. Otherwise physics would become a study of idealized systems, much like insisting on Newtonian maths when the principles of relativity and quantum mechanics were discovered.

Can you give me an example of how a "mind-first" approach might give a divergent prediction, as to the outcome of a practically feasible experiment or observation? Maybe some versions of idealism might produce divergent predictions, but I don't believe divergent predictions are necessary to idealism, and many versions of idealism intentionally eschew divergent predictions.

> Otherwise physics would become a study of idealized systems, much like insisting on Newtonian maths when the principles of relativity and quantum mechanics were discovered.

Physics is a system for predicting future observations given past observations. Relativity and QM won because they generated more accurate future predictions than their predecessors.

But what, ultimately, is it that we are observing? Do the theoretical constructs proposed by physics (particles, waves, fields, forces, strings, branes, etc) "really" exist, or are they just abstract conceptual tools for accurate prediction generation? What does "really" even mean in that question? These are all philosophical questions, and idealism is one family of possible answers to (some of those) philosophical questions–but I don't see how that makes any difference to the whole business of generating accurate predictions of future observations–which is all that physics proper actually is, has ever been, or ever will be.

Let's assume a particular universe where only minds really exist (and more than one mind). Let's further assume that the imagination of the mind can shape the physical world, and in a way that the "local" reality is more strongly influenced by the minds in the vicinity.

Let's say A and B are in an isolated room. They are into alternative medicine and strongly believe A can cure B of a disease. Because there only two minds involved, and they both believed it, B is apparently miraculously cured of the disease.

Now, let's change the setting slightly. This time, in addition to A and B, there are also C, D, and E, who are researchers trying to validate A's claims of miraculous healing. C, D, E are scientists who don't believe in such woowoo and are determined to expose A's frauds. A performs the same acts on B. This time, it does not work, because CDE did not believe in it.

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Now, back to reality. Given how modern science operates and general disbelief that mind can influence reality, you can see that it is not hard to tweak some variants of these "mind-first" approaches to fit the vast majority of modern scientific observations (i.e. there's no magic healing). But the theories can produce divergent predictions (i.e. magic healing can work if you have enough "faith") under conditions where modern science is unwilling to collect evidence.

And I personally think there should be some way to tweak such theories in a way that first and foremost respects the observations and conclusions made by modern science, but also in a way consistent with a large portion of the religious and mystical traditions. (Did you know why Jesus requested people to have faith as a condition for performing healing? Now you have a theory to explain that. [disclaimer: I'm not remotely close to being a Christian])

I understand that some philosophers may feel content arguing whether we've made up all this and it's all in our imaginations (but not claim any predictions beyond accepted modern science), but it seems (to me at least) to defeat the whole purpose of the exercise if we're positing the universe is just a thought of our minds, and not even consider the possibility that we can imagine something other than what we are imagining right now.

Yes it sounds like quackery and the grossly simplified theories has holes in them, but that's why no self respecting person dares seriously bring up these topics (or let you fully into what they're actually trying to steer the topic towards)...

But, I think (1) is false. We actually have far less control over the contents of our own minds than many of us think we do. Anyone who has ever struggled with mental illness or addiction knows this fact very well. But, even for people who are thankfully unaffected by either: how much of our choices are truly "free", and how much are they predetermined by our genetics and by social/cultural influences? We don't know for sure, but probably a lot more than many people assume. And if (1) is false, the whole argument falls apart.

A lot of what you are saying seems to be rather adjacent to this line of argument. I don't agree that idealism makes the psychic/miraculous "more likely". I agree they are possible under idealism – but they are possible under materialism too. It may so happen that the laws of this universe, insofar as we know them, don't permit psychic powers or miracles – but, that's a consequence of what those laws happen to be, not of materialism in itself, and materialism could be just as true even with very different laws of physics which did permit psychic powers and miracles and magic and so forth.

Furthermore, the known laws of physics actually do permit all those things, with unimaginably low (but non-zero) probability – quantum tunnelling, quantum fluctuations, thermal fluctuations, etc, permit just about anything imaginable to happen (or at least appear to happen, in a way which nobody could distinguish from them actually happening), with unimaginably small yet still non-zero (and non-infinitesimal) probability. But, in a spatiotemporally infinite universe, any event with non-zero probability (however remote) will almost surely eventually happen, somewhere and somewhen, even an infinite number of times; indeed, in a spatially infinite universe, every non-zero probability event is almost surely happening somewhere right now, even an infinite number of times simultaneously – including your scenario. And people call idealism crazy–is materialism really any better? At least idealists can say "we have no reason to believe the universe actually exists beyond its observable limits", thereby avoiding the threat of a spatially infinite universe in which every possible event almost surely is happening somewhere right now – that way of avoiding the threat comes naturally to (some versions of) idealism, it is much more arbitrary for a materialist.

That said, even though you say materialism permits pretty much anything, the probabilities are supposed to be radically different. Materialism predicts that "Jesus" is practically impossible, and some versions of idealism suggests it is a dime a dozen. It seems reality is probably somewhere in between.

My personal theory is that the universe pretends as if it is materialistic by fudging with probabilities. (and also with limits of computations in the sense that if you can't practically solve a computation problem the answer may not actually exist in the same sense as observable limits you mentioned)