I went through the whole indoctrinated-religious, "devout" atheist, "scientific" agnostic, and now I guess I'm a theist.
Why? Because I read a book on consciousness that came like a bolt out of the blue and I understood that we do not understand.
I don't buy this "emergent property of the mind" thing because while I understand evolutionary theory I am not sure how you bridge that gap to subjective experience.
I have absolutely no clue what this "god" is that I accepted, but I know I'm not going to be punished for leaving this comment.
EDIT: just read the comments. I've been to BNL and CERN.
Unless I've misunderstood you, it sounds like you're advocating the "god of the gaps" argument. Don't understand something? Hide it behind the ol' God Band-Aid and call it a day. But that's just ignoring the problem with extra steps.
As a side-note, there are some radical, fascinating attacks on the hard problem of consciousness, such as dual-aspect monism.[1] I'd love to hear y'alls thoughts.
> I don't buy this "emergent property of the mind" thing because while I understand evolutionary theory I am not sure how you bridge that gap to subjective experience.
So you don't know, or aren't aware of any existing scientific theory, therefore it's magic?
I think the biggest question from all of this, including the fascinating comments on this thread, why is Elon Musk and OpenAI talking about the singularity at this moment in time? We aren't there, we don't have anyway of knowing when or if we'll ever be there. One thing that is real, AI is buzzing with excitement but nobody knows why.
And your claim is that consciousness is responsible for science, computers, existence...? I think you need to reread those books on atheism. Pay particular attention to the god of the gaps argument.
There are many things we don't understand, and as time pass we gradually understand more and more of them.
What does this have to do with the existence or not of God? Do you go back and forth between atheist/theist every time a new answer is discovered and a new question is asked?
Christian mystical theology has never had a problem with the god of the gaps argument. It's always postulated that God was something so utterly alien from us (prior to time itself!) that we can know him only through revelation. The nature of God lies in the realm of the unknown, for our finite minds cannot grasp the infinite. Knowledge of God is given only through experience and his grace. What has been revealed is logic-defying and mind-bending, although it has a certain paternicity of its own.
Whether the God of the Gaps points you towards atheism or theism depends on your concept of the unknown. If you think of it as a fixed sized bucket of things gradually trending towards zero due to the effort of science, then you are an atheist. If you think of the unknown as practically limitless in size and our process of discovery as barely scratching the surface, then you are pointed towards theism. Generally, materialists trend towards the former and phenomenologists towards the latter.
As the wikipedia article stats, the idea was proposed first by Christians rather than skeptics, arguing that it's a weak form of faith, so you're definitely right on that point.
> Whether the God of the Gaps points you towards atheism or theism depends on your concept of the unknown
I really like this assessment. Looking at the sibling comments here, most seem to think all questions will be answered eventually, but I suppose that's impossible to know, since we don't even know what all the questions are yet.
>There are many things we don't understand, and as time pass we gradually understand more and more of them.
On the contrary, when it comes to the fundamental nature of the universe, the more we've come to understand, the more we've come to realize how much even more we do not understand.
This is not the contrary.
We realize better how much we do not understand, but we do understand more and more.
More things are moving from 'unknown unknowns' to 'known unknowns', this is a progress in understanding, not the other way around.
When Copernicus mathematically determined that the sun was at the center of the universe rather than the earth, was that "actual comprehension", or "perceived comprehension"?
> There are many things we don't understand, and as time pass we gradually understand more and more of them. What does this have to do with the existence or not of God?
You’ve committed a mental shortcut. It’s too hard, therefore God, or magic, or whatever.
I’m convinced the ability to form short and long-term memories is crucial to our consciousness. Take that away and a human being is little more than a fruit fly, mentally.
It really depends on his theology. I'd agree if he succumbed to a prescribed framework of dogma. But for those freethinkers seeking inner truth there are no shortcuts.
I think it's invalid to say he casts it in the "too hard basket" because he chooses theology. On the contrary, I think you cast it into the too hard basket because you're so steadfast on believing in the rational.
It is after all the unifying question all Humans have pondered for possibly hundreds of thousands of years now. We still have no answers, maybe that's why we have religion? In any case, humans can't answer this fundamental question no matter how good our science has gotten so in my book, he's okay to give up on that. Life is too short. If theism works for someone, especially after such a great effort to find answers, he sounds like an ideal human to me. Probably a really level headed individual, but I'm just guessing like everybody else.
On the contrary, it’s a problem that I would like to work on but lack the bandwidth to do so at the time being. Just because I don’t have the bandwidth to work on it doesn’t make it unsolvable.
Theology lacks proof. I’m happy to believe in God if there’s proof. It should be easy to prove the existence of a singular being with unlimited power, no?
"The wind blows where it wishes. You hear its sound, but you do not know where it comes from or where it is going. So it is with everyone born of the Spirit." (John 3:8)
Why believe that a god is reponsible for the gaps rather than believe that we simply don't have the answers yet and that eventually science will give us them (as it has in the past, countless times)?
I would take this further: even if we NEVER get those answers (because of some inherent physical limit in our observation and understanding of physical phenomenon, similar to how Heisenberg's uncertainty principle means it's impossible to observe accurately both momentum and position) it still doesn't mean there needs to be "god" introduced in the equation to explain that which is unexplainable.
Once you accept that not everything is knowable, not everything is observable, not everything is explainable and not everything has to have a purpose, and all that is perfectly fine without the existence of a divine being, then why do we need to add a divine being in the mix?
I think the main reason is that if we reach that limit of knowledge, we will always be left with the question, "How did something come from nothing?" I don't know if humans will ever be able to explain that question as it's not something we can experience. That naturally lends itself to the conclusion that there is something greater than us in the universe that can manipulate the physical world we observe in ways we do not understand. Whether that is the colliding of multiverses or divine intervention we wouldn't and couldn't ever know.
Not at all. It’s perfectly okay in science to say we don’t know how that happens yet. Deciding that we’ll never know is an irrational leap. The “never” is a strong statement and requires proof. Can you prove never? I don’t think so. Then why assume it?
Well, there's never a way for me to know whether solipsism is true, or to even calculate a (meaningful) probability of it being true. In fact, this applies to probably infinitely many strange metaphysicses. All I know is that I'm conscious (or, more precisely, that "consciousness is"). I can say that "assuming the standard scientific metaphysics is correct, science might solve it," but that assumption is enormous and untestable.
That's assuming that "arising" is done as some part of logical plan. The universe doesn't have to be logical, physical phenomena doesn't have to follow human observation and logic. It's crazy hubris to assume the opposite IMO.
Just wanted to say: I like the way you think. In fact, I'm writing up a piece about how to arrive at (what is presumably) a similar realization. In brief: (1) notice consciousness, (2) notice that it's impossible (in a well-defined sense) to know what is causing it. If done right, there can be an epiphany.
What part of subjective experience exactly do you think that evolutionary theory fails to explain? I study evolution quite a bit and, while there are many details about behavior and learning that are still missing, AFAICT it seems to explain consciousness and subjectivity pretty well.
> Consciousness. We could and should be robots. There is nothing to reproducing that requires this, which is the survival of the fittest.
Humans are social animals. To interact with other people, it is probably evolutionarily advantageous to have a mental model that can predict the actions of other people. Consciousness might be simply an offshoot of that mental model, in which a person predicts their own actions, too.
I'm not saying that this theory is true, although I do think I heard it somewhere. (Maybe it's in I am a Strange Loop?) But it's just meant to be an example of how consciousness could arise as a side effect of something with an actual reproductive advantage.
Darwin pointed this out as a possible explanation for the emergence of altruism and morality. He didn't like the idea of group selection, so he suggested that humans might have started to reason that if they helped others, others might be inclined to help them in the future. As I mentioned in my other comment this probably emerged as a side-effect of the increased memory/reasoning-buffer required for language processing.
You're not the first to consider this possibility, as you know. The novelist Peter Watts, in Blindsight, has a remarkably interesting, if also remarkably dark, take on the same idea. I won't spoil it here, since the book is an enjoyable read and freely available from the author's site: https://www.rifters.com/real/Blindsight.htm
("Philosophical zombie" would be a more precise term than "robot", btw, and might make soi-disant rationalists take you slightly more seriously because it's closer to the sort of language they like to use. I don't know why that would be a desideratum for anyone, but if it is for you, this may be worth considering.)
Given infinite time and infinite space, anything can happen. Time is a weird thing, but it seems more of it is created every day, increasing the possibilities.
What do you mean with robots? Describe how our actions would be different if we were robots, compared with our reality where we are not.
Brain teaser answer: Well, that's more of a question of physics, and the origins of the big bang. We are talking about brains here. They came about some billions of years later.
Explain to me how a somewhat intelligent creature would experience it's life without consciousness? What's the alternative? How would you, as a living creature, be able to sense your environment, and fight for preserving your survival, if you didn't have a sense of self?
All I know is that "experiences seem to be happening." This "sheer fact of seeming" (aka experience) is all I can ever know, and to label it an "illusion" isn't really meaningful. "Illusions" are specific experiences that don't correspond to some truth (that I have derived from my metaphysical models, which I in turn derived from my experiences).
I'm not denying that the experience of life or consciousness exists. I just think it's not as significant as some make it out to be.
The question still stands. How would a creature experience life without consciousness?
Or let's even say you created a generally intelligent neural net with sufficient sensors, cameras, and actuators for it to live in our physical world, piped into the neural network. It learns to use it's sensors and actuators, much like a growing child would. What is it's experience? How does this neural network experience life as compared to our brains?
To give you a hint, it wouldn't have a Heads-Up-Display with a battery indicator. It would feel tired or hungry. It would experience life immersed in the world to the extent that it's sensors would allow it. It's sensors would be naturally fused in it's neural net in whatever way was most optimal for it's environment. Much in the same way that we use sight, sensation in our feet and muscles, and the liquid in our ears to maintain our balance without ever thinking about the source or distinction in the data our brains are receiving.
I'll expand my own take on this thought, borrowing a mathematical analogy I read recently.
Take the real and complex numbers. The real numbers have the nice property that they are easy to order since they form a line. Given any two you can tell which is larger. When you go up the complex numbers you lose this obvious ordering, you can define a new ordering, but it is no longer trivial since you are comparing points on a plane.
Now, some people see complex numbers as an extension of the real numbers, but it would be more accurate to call them a generalization of the real numbers. The real numbers are a subset of the complex numbers that satisfy the property of having this obvious ordering.
This again extends to the complex numbers and quaternions. A quaternion is a point on a 4D plane that does not necessarily satisfy commutativity, AKA ab != ba. The subset of quaternions that do satisfy commutativity are the complex numbers.
Every time you go up a level you lose an axiom, which is an assumption on how things work for that system. In a sense an axiom is a useful limitation that gives a certain structure to things. So what if there are 0 axioms? This would mean everything is possible, no limitations. 2 + 2 = 5. Obviously everything being possible is not useful.
Now how does this apply to physics? Physical laws are our axioms. But what if there are actually no physical laws, we are just witnessing the subset of "everything" that appears to have structure? If we are only capable of understanding things that are rational, we would be inherently unable to process events that are irrational. We would project this irrational observation down to the rational subset that we can make sense of. Let me finish with an example.
Take a uniform quantum superposition. It has an equally random chance of being measured 0 or 1. There is no hidden information determining this, it is truly random. This is irrational because there seems like there should be a reason for one final outcome being measured over the other due to our familiarity with cause-and-effect, but this ultimately appears to have no cause. We project this phenomena down to the rational and explain it the best we can with quantum states and probability.
I think evolution explains that fine. It's the same story as for physical development: the extrapolation and refinement of living organisms via natural selection over the course of hundreds of millions of years.
Consciousness is hard to define, but if we examine animal intelligence it unsurprisingly seems to exist at various levels of complexity. So even worms have intelligence (and consciousness IMO) that isn't quite robotic: they react in predictable ways to light, but the reaction is modulated by other factors like temperature, moisture and what they are doing at the time. Their behavior can be described by a simple neural net, which is in fact what they have. (see Darwin 1881)
Larger animals evolved the ability to evaluate multiple such signals simultaneously, and to do so it's necessary that lower level consciousness (like what the worm has) can send signals to higher levels of consciousness for evaluation. So if my foot is cramping a lower level system sends an appropriate pain signal to a higher level system, which can then aggregate that signal with other signals and cross reference it against current active behavioral plans. If I am meditating, I might ignore the pain, but if I'm working I might get up and stretch. This is similar to how the reaction of a worm is modulated, but just filtered up through higher levels of consciousness.
Why would we develop higher levels of consciousness? Because any change to animal brains that allowed them to be aware of sensory input and evaluate it with reference to behavioral goals (instead of just reacting like a robot) would increase that animals fitness, and any marginal increase in fitness will result in those traits being passed on.
The most significant one for human consciousness in particular is that the appearance of language pushed evolution in the direction of favoring a large working memory. If you can tell me "the bananas are down the hill, to the right, across the stream, next to the big stone" and I can remember that information and go find the bananas, then my fitness is improved. Darwin also pointed out that this increased working memory allows people to reason that if I help someone, that other person might help me back, allowing altruism to emerge from the cognitive space allotted to planning, which evolved from the pressures related to holding large chunks of linguistic data in the mind.
So there are two things: first is subjective experience, which to me seems to be easily explainable as being like "system signals" from lower systems to higher systems. It's important to remember here that the appearance of information itself and intelligent responses to the environment is one of the defining features of all life, even the most basic (Adolf Heschel 2002). The smell of rotten eggs (example from the article) is simply a chemical signal that we have, understandably, evolved an aversion to. My reaction to ice-cream is similarly a chemical signal filtered through a lower biological system which interprets it as something REALLY GOOD and sends the appropriate signals to my higher level cognitive systems. The fact that it's a subjective signal and not a "robotic" reaction means that I can respond to it differently depending on other factors, which is clearly advantageous from the POV of natural selection. If I have diabetes I can resist the temptation of "deliciousness" to my great advantage.
The second thing is that humans have a great memory, so we can hold lots of these signals in our minds alongside memories, plans, ideas etc. Since that ability was associated with increased fitness over millions of years, it has increased to the level we see today.
I largely agree, but it feels a bit like side-stepping the real question. We can make decisions that are completely orthogonal (and a lot of times opposite) to whatever would increase our "fitness". This agency is what's peculiar about consciousness in my opinion. Personally I think it is some sort of parallel, rouge system that has branched of from the higher level controller mechanism that you describe.
That's the amazing thing about evolution: the products of evolution don't have to be well engineered, they don't have to be perfect, they don't even really have to make sense. They only have to confer a marginal benefit to individuals with respect to their reproduction.
There are plenty of examples of bad design in evolution, human consciousness included (anxiety, depression etc). It's only necessary that the benefits outweigh the drawbacks for the feature to stick around.
It is amazing indeed! At some point our memes, language and culture became more powerful than any natural mutations. Perhaps this was helped by these irrational/rogue features of our consciousness.
Why? Because I read a book on consciousness that came like a bolt out of the blue and I understood that we do not understand.
I don't buy this "emergent property of the mind" thing because while I understand evolutionary theory I am not sure how you bridge that gap to subjective experience.
I have absolutely no clue what this "god" is that I accepted, but I know I'm not going to be punished for leaving this comment.
EDIT: just read the comments. I've been to BNL and CERN.