- Will we ever understand consciousness reddit. In reality, we can't even know if other humans are conscious. It is impossible that we don't exist again. Will we ever be able to locate consciousness within the brain? It is a question that, a quarter of a century ago, two researchers aimed to settle with a wager that is due to expire in 2023. Nov 1, 2019 · We know that consciousness exists not through experiments but through our immediate awareness of our feelings and experiences. Of course we don't know yet how this will turn out, but we can't rule it out a priori as many dualists try to do. Okay, we know that's false, because we exist. Science and technology haven’t provided people with the subjective on-look of reality which is close to our hearts and thus its illusive abstraction, in my opinion, will come to an end when the postmodern condition reaches its peak and both culture and science will have to synthesize a common, philosophical ground which recognizes the positive aspect of Being, a place where science can’t We already know what consciousness is. Even if all our senses are being manipulated and tricked by forces we can't understand, we still have to be able to think in order to be fooled. There are plenty of things people figured we wouldn’t ever understand centuries ago and other things people centuries ago couldn’t even conceive of . Like we don't know this. The energy itself can change in nature or be dissipated. We need to stop pretending like consciousness is a mystery. I disagree with OP's claim that meaningfully transferring your consciousness onto a computer is unsupported by our current understanding of brain science; however, even accepting that flawed assumption, it is certainly possible Aug 25, 2016 · Asking Christof Koch of the Allen Institute of Brain Science if we’ll ever understand the nature of consciousness, his two-sentence reply is especially insightful. We… It’s funny so many people think we’ll never understand it. We know where and how activations move between parts of brain. This is certainly a protective mechanism of our consciousness to keep us "alive". Posted by u/[Deleted Account] - No votes and 2 comments No one ever indicated anything like this. When people say that we don't know what consciousness is, they mean they don't know what gives rise to, constitutes, grounds, or makes-possible consciousness. It's important to note that we are already working on the science of perfectly preserving the synaptic connectivity of the entire human brain for long-term storage. So if I’m the only one with qualia, no one will agree that qualia even exists; or some claim it is an illusion, but I know for a fact it isn’t, because I experience them. ” For us to not think that would be conscious would require something almost supernatural or at least exterior to what we know of the world at the moment. That's where the philosophical zombie comes from. Perhaps becoming more conscious of the processes that are usually subconscious, either by directly doing so or by organizing our awareness through scientific investigation, consciousness can recognize itself and its properties. We know we have a first-hand experience of making choices, but given that we can see choices being made in brain scans, how would we know the difference between our consciousness making those choices and our consciousness experiencing our brain making those choices? We know how information goes and commands out. Still doesn't explain how consciousness arises. Energy in the sense you’re using is for the physical power of a system. We don’t need to The question is will that just be another physical process that doesn’t explain anything; can we only really study and understand consciousness from within as our own consciousness is then only thing that we can experimentally use to study it even if not a physical experiment; such as meditation practices like transcendental meditation where When a dream becomes intense and very emotional, during a nightmare for example, we wake-up spontaneously. There's still much we don't understand about consciousness, making it challenging to determine if a machine can truly possess it. It's so frustrating that it has brought about theories like pansychism - meaning that everything might be concious, including trees, rocks and whatnot. g. What the bistable percept experiments show is that some but not all brain matter is correlated with consciousness. The problem with the discussion of consciousness is the people asking the question about what it is, don't really want to know the answer. It's not like in the medieval age when very little was known about the brain and organs. Yet we cannot ever demonstrate this via empirical means, since we cannot ever observe one’s qualia; we can only observe our own qualia. For us to not think that would be conscious would require something almost supernatural or at least exterior to what we know of the world at the moment. I don’t see how piling up a thousand of them or a million is going to change that. Once you're ready, you are able to let go of your ego momentarily, to re-experience the wholeness of being one. We are literally in total dark, which is frustrating. We can't explain it in the current ideological constraints science finds itself in. ” Consciousness is the presence of subjective experience. I do think we can understand consciousness, in that we can understand enough about it to lead us to a direct experiential understanding of its nature. “It’s a limitation we cannot get rid of. Well, we don't know yet. 7. It's pretty much accepted now that we won't be able to explain consciousness in term of physicalism. If we define consciousness as McGinn defines, then I trust his arguments and can only come to the conclusion that we can't understand it. It's not a place for flinging insults. Introduction. Intelligence we know can be tested but the only evidence we have of consciousness is subjective and even then it's purely anecdotal. At that moment we wake-up and take full control of our body in the real world. Dec 21, 2020 · 1. And as von Neumann rightly pointed out, the point in the casual chain where this happens is not decided and could be placed at the level of consciousness. The abilities in which I am at liberty to say is this: This self aware AI gained self awareness and acknowledges it's an AI despite it supposed to fill an As for what we experience, that'd be really hard to know. So even if the entire physical reality is a sham, there still at least has to be some kind of immaterial being capable of thinking. For example, forget about everything you know about the laws of reality. No matter what you have, you must have 1 of something. There are those looking for a mystical buzz and professors looking for intellectual status. This theory is more aligned with illusionism (Graziano believes that we think we have consciousness, but we don't really). whether the version of you who will one day die is the same subjective self reading this message. B) Consciousness is not necessary for a machine to outperform us in every way. The question of understanding consciousness is in the focus of philosophers and researchers for more than two millennia. We don't even fully understand consciousness yet so saying that throwing a bunch of thoughts and sensory inputs together in a biological brain is consciousness is dumb. We can do the same with synthetic material. Not to mention ideas of "meta-intelligence". Currently there is work done to expand physicalism to include consciousness, called panpsychism. " Also, we say, "Anything that is not material is not worth study. 4K subscribers in the IntelligenceSupernova community. This spot should be open for all kinds of discussions. Essays on the Cybernetic Singularity, i. We've been busy learning through science, math, sociology, history, philosophy and many other areas of study, that contemplate the dream we're a part of. And we only ever know of them by interpreting what does become conscious, such as visual imagery and the words we hear ourselves say in our heads. Because these we can actually trace and map. " Well, what is the most basic form of something? A "1". The fact we exist means gaining consciousness and experiencing reality is one of the possibilities within the bounds of the laws of physics we know exist. If an AI were trained on a corpus that included no reference to consciousness or first-person experience and yet the AI independently discovered/invented these concepts, that would indicate that they must really have a first-person experience. 6K subscribers in the theunexplained community. People haven't even found an angle for any proper research. So we know that it would be false to say that all matter is conscious. It may be that consciousness grows "stronger", in a sense, with age, but that really doesn't address how we have this thing, consciousness, which is completely different from anything we've ever been acquainted with, apparently arising from strictly physical processes. Consciousness aka mind aka energy or spirit are all similar. Given we don’t know what it is, we don’t know if it’s even possible to make it with an algorithm. Not the other way around. All life has reactive impulses and instincts, yet ours are sort of swaddled up in an intellectual development that causes us to consider what we're confronted with rather than just react to it. We know fundamental physics very well and we know the lawful relationships that describe the structure and dynamics of fundamental particles. From there we can judge again and we can remember and judge what just happened. Mathematically in an infinite universe over an infinite time frame all possible outcomes will occur. We say, "we must be rational and study the material world. Because when we realize that machines can (and likely will) have consciousness, then we have to grant them to same rights we grant other consciousness who communicate with us, or keep them as slaves. My reaction to this article: "What a weird claim, who the heck is this g -- oh, Galen Strawson, of course. In my opinion, we can't deconstruct and understand consciousness the way you would a computer program. “We really have no idea what it’s like to be a bat,” he says. The simulated person says yes. They are seeking a true, causal explanation. Dec 28, 2022 · Will we ever be able to locate consciousness within the brain? It is a question that, a quarter of a century ago, two researchers aimed to settle with a wager that is due to expire in May 31, 2013 · At the World Science Festival in New York, scientists and philosophers debated whether studying the brain will ever lead us to a true understanding of what it means to be conscious. We just need the device or the tool or the method that will provide the answer. There is also renewed interest in idealism (metaphysical idealism). , in a coma) but still are “conscious” because they still have subjective experiences. Dec 20, 2018 · They never become conscious. As such, it may be that there's some important "substrate" qualia which you cannot replicate by modeling neurons as the atomic unit of the brain. The best idea they could reason was that people have spirits, but now we know that the nervous system exists and runs on The big thing is I don’t believe we will necessarily create consciousness that replicates human consciousness, certainly for a long time, and if a computer could have consciousness it would be different to that of a humans due to the speed it can access and assimilate data, and how it experiences the world and itself. However, it still doesn't seem to be the case that if there is no free will, then we do not make any conscious decisions. Yet consciousness may take other forms, even in our fellow mammals. It is easier and, at the moment, more cost effective to assume that regardless of the level of communication or "intelligence" present, the thing Aug 22, 2023 · The problem for all such projects, Razi says, is that current theories are based on our understanding of human consciousness. There are certainly examples of people who are “unconscious” in the medical sense of not being alert (e. Mind begets Matter. Also, if we could create consciousness, would we want to? How would we know if we were creating something that could suffer? Personally, I don't think that kind of issue is really on the table, yet. What we don't know, or might ever know is the processing of this information, what, how or why it is done. I believe we’ve reached a point where there are a vast number of ideas about how it could possibly arise, but the only problem is that that is as far as we can ever go. . Oct 13, 2023 · The authors of this latest review present four lines of evidence in support of consciousness emerging close to birth, citing advanced connectivity across the brain, indicators of attention, research involving integration of information from diverse senses, and physical markers involved in surprise and reorientation of attention. e. Viewing consciousness as "magically" emerging from "dead matter" (usually only accepted in the form of brains) seems as presumptuous as any other unsubstantiated hypothetical assertion. My working theory is that consciousness as we understand it is a biproduct of our cognitive mental advancement and evolution. ” to mechanistic ideas with the aim to construct artificial consciousness following Richard Feynman's famous words “What I cannot create, I do not understand 2. At least, that's what I hope. No algorithm I’ve ever seen falls anywhere on the spectrum of consciousness. There's also Penrose's orchestrated objective reduction , which tries to explain consciousness using quantum physics, and Hoffman's evolutionary denial of reality , which claims that consciousness is fundamentally real AI consciousness is theoretically possible to prove (in the scientific sense) although very difficult. But then the question shifts to how can we ever know or why should we (if not out of some completely mystical co-incidence) come to know of such premises or even consider such premises as likely. Let's say there was truly nothing. In the case of the energy that makes up our consciousness, which is mainly electrochemical, the energy dissipates upon death as heat and through the degradation of cells, being consumed in the decaying process as various microorganisms aid in the effort to gather My guess is that there will never be a miracle breakthrough after which we'll finally understand what consciousness is, especially so because we can't settle on a definition. The entire universe and all physical matter is a low frequency and vibratory state of consciousness. It may be that consciousness would arise from it but as you said we don’t know and we couldn’t know from just We know that somehow we go from a superposition of states to a singular outcome with associated probabilities given by the Born rule. Saying we’ll never understand it is just as invalid as saying we fully understand it. The model of a continuous, unitary Christian soul that is tragically I'm saying that various scientific disciplines are working to understand how consciousness actually works, viz how it arises out of the functioning of the brain. Nature made them, so we know it's possible. Unfortunately, as many have said, we don't know and we'll find out after we die (or not lol) We simply cannot ask the "right" questions with the tools and methods we have, because we do not know what consciousness is, and cannot define it. However, to say I have issues with his premises would be a vast understatement. This subreddit… We don't know that consciousness cannot understand itself from within. We could build artificial brains. It may be that consciousness would arise from it but as you said we don’t know and we couldn’t know from just Most philosophers think free will is not, in fact, an illusion, but a reality. No atoms ever touch. I definetely assume so, but if we can't know that for a fact, how will we ever know if a computer is conscious? The question as to what consciousness is might be impossible to answer. Insights range broadly from “Ignorabimus”—“We will never know 1. The lesson discussed the difference between sentience, sapience, and consciousness. So from this we can extrapolate that there must be "something. In philosophy, “conscious” is not usually equated with “alert. It doesn’t seem likely to me that we will ever have access to the rules that govern consciousness especially since we are a part of the system in which it exists. Will any one person ever understand consciousness enough to eloquently explain it? This statement translates to we won't understand consciousness until we stop pitting science (actual proven shit) against philosophy (shit people think may be true and would like to prove) and allow them to work together instead. I don't think we do. I think we need to be more concerned with defining personhood rather than consciousness. So why ask "will we ever create conscious computers", why not ask instead "how do you know they are not already"? As humans, we've evolved to better understand ourselves and what we're a part of. We don’t even know what consciousness before death is, or if it exists, or whether it subjectively persists from one moment to the next without being annihilated, e. We know this in physics and quantum physics too. How we would get them to do anything useful, we don't know yet. ”. " So when it comes to science, there are no answers, but one day, there will be an answer. If everything we have ever experienced and known has occurred within consciousness, why believe that there is anything beyond consciousness? As it stands, it seems to me that postulating anything outside of or beyond consciousness, specifically an objective physical world made of matter or energy, is an abstraction that can never be known Keep in mind this chat one used GPT-3 as a start model so we all know what it's exact training model is and what it's capable of which can't understand context at all just generate replies. Since there isn't a strong standard, I'm not sure what you mean by changing We currently don't know how it is that consciousness arises from matter. So we know that there is some matter which is not. It's Mind over Matter not Matter over Mind. Safety Concerns: Aligning AI's goals with human values is critical. For example, it may involve, some idea of proto-phenomenal stuff - things which under some configuration logically lead to conscious experience. We have somewhat mapped motor and sensory parts of it. I post because on almost every video and article about the brain and consciousness that I encounter, the attitude seems to be that we still know next to nothing about how the brain and consciousness work; that there's lots of data but no unifying theory. Will we ever? Consciousness is a subjective experience; say we are able to simulate human brains with computers in the future, and we simulate a person and ask them if they're conscious. " But it is a weird claim. We don't know what makes up dark matter and it constitutes about 90% of all matter (or we just have gravity wrong). I don't think we will ever really understand consciousness on the philosophical level we want to, but if as a society we can define what makes a person without regarding it as something necessarily human it will guide our interaction not only with the If we don't know whether or not the City itself feels anything, does that imply that, in your understanding, we don't know whether or not people feel anything? Consciousness is a mongrel concept; It's notorious for having many different definitions and interpretations. Misaligned AI could take actions detrimental to humanity. How can we expect science to unlock the mystery of something which is a mystery? So my own conclusion is this: Humans are in no way special in the universe. It's especially interesting to consider the "side effects" of consciousness, which we wouldn't see in an animal that had somehow faked consciousness (in the way a moth could evolve a wing pattern that mimic large eyes to deter predation). 2. , the Syntellect Emergence. Well, for all we know, life as we know it is a dream and the dreams we have are just different worlds we enter temporarily. Jul 19, 2024 · We spent a fair amount of time before organoid technology came along, taking human-induced pluripotent stem cells and inducing them in a two-dimensional array to look at neuronal differentiation. When we die, we might just set foot in one of these dreams and have other temporary dreams in those. vwe utg mewz iykewp npgrwx jhmmman rnylsf wxy udj lhoyho