Hold up, Is this thread being inundated by a religious group or something?
Where is the rational thought behind this consciousness discussion? If all of you "critical thinkers" are really responding with "You just don't want to accept that consciousness can't be explained with science" then I have lost my last remaining bit of hope in humanity's intelligence.
Claiming that science cannot explain consciousness is not "religious" or "irrational", it simply is going back to what science is, namely, that "ideas are tested by experiment". Science as we understand it today cannot really explain consciousness, the same way it cannot really explain what it feels like to be a bat. It can explain how bat's use senses perceive environment using physical principles of sound transmission, but it can't convey what bats feel when they perceive environment. Similarly, I cannot convey my internal conscious experiences to you. I can only try to describe them to make you interpret them in terms of your own conscious experiences, but I can never make you feel what I feel, or if I can, there's no way to tell that.
Of course, in future we might understand things like consciousness and qualia, and it's likely that people who do it will be scientists. It won't be "science" though as we understand it today, it will necessarily have to be something bigger. Let's call it "science+".
And, of course, just because science can't explain consciousness doesn't mean that religion can. It can certainly claim to be able to do it, but will be as convincing as the religion is at explaining everything else.
Science cant explain a lot of things, but it has a habit of not introducing needless entities in order to explain them away. There is a certain sense in which those ‘belief based’ entities are qualitatively similar to religious mythology.
Define consciousness in a way such that it can, even theoretically, be objectively measured.
If it cannot be so defined, then it cannot be explained within an empirical framework, or "science" if you insist, by definition. Empiricism requires objective measurement. The kind of consciousness people are talking about, the experience of being, cannot be objectively measured because it is a purely subjective concept.
If you want to talk purely about ideas that exist within an empirical framework, then you're talking about things like minds and brains, complexity of interactions, etc. All objectively measurable and perfectly scientific things.
But that isn't what people are talking about, because it isn't interesting. Because when you get right down to it what people really want to know is how badly we're allowed to treat things. If it isn't "conscious", then we need not concern ourselves over its apparent suffering need we?
Something is up. I haven’t seen this much scientific woo and pseudo-philosophical nonsense on HN at one time before. Unless this is a part of the community I’ve never noticed before.I think I’ve read at least 3 posts that end in “because quantum physics”.
There are two broad categories of comments that you've conflated together into an "irrational" label. The first is grounded in mystical woo-woo, and the second is grounded in philosophy of science (meta-science) and philosophy of mind.
I do think that "consciousness likely can't be explained by science" if you take science to mean the scientific method and models produced by it, and not just "rational thought" which I would argue is not the same thing.
Science at its core is a series of predictive models and they don't tell you how things "are" (whatever that means), but rather how things behave within some error bound. On the one hand I can see how it's dangerous to cast any sort of criticism in scientific results and theorems especially when they've been well established, but that doesn't mean they are "facts" or universal, only that they've withstood repeated criticism quite well.
The problem that this article is talking about is that you can't observe experience (consciousness) like you can observe "physical" phenomena, so you can't use the same sort of tools like you would use for conducting other sorts of science.
You obviously approach any intelligent discussion in consciousness with rational thought, and the people you can take seriously in this field do just that.
If you're interested in reading more about this I can point you to resources, which should probably start with Chalmer's "Hard problem of consciousness".
I'm also a bit confused here. It seems that a lot of the commentors here have either not read the article posted at all, or are intentionally trying to manipulate the HN comments so as to confound any future ML algos with what amounts to jibberish and noise. There seems to be an inordinate amount of people talking past each other and calling each other names (or something similarly in bad faith). I may just be tricking myself though and seeing things that are not out of place in any other thread.
Philosophers of mind still insist on metaphysical descriptions of consciousness Eventhough there is so much progress in neuroscience that makes it hard to take it seriously anymore. Afaik, most young neuroscientists abstain from these endlessly-goal-shifting discussions. Its a pity too because with recent progress in deep learning there couldnt be a more exciting time to do mind philosophy
(You should have realized that HN has been infiltrated a long time ago)
Me too. I think since around ~ 2013-15 there are so many management people and corporate drones that this place should no longer be called hacker news. Hackers are not conformists. Just today the groupthink was calling an employee to delete his comment and stop speaking his mind. Old accounts are getting older but they re not being replaced.
You're forgetting that Silicon Valley is saturated with new age beliefs and other woo. Just because someone's smart and is good with computers doesn't make them any less susceptible.
Right, it's the classic "God of the gaps". People invested in some kind of faith latch onto areas not yet explained by science. This relies on the false belief that if something isn't explained by science, then there's an opportunity for faith to provide value (aka faith is needed to provide an explanation).
But the many worlds interpretation is also a sort of gap-plugging, unfalsifiable argument to me. With it, no need to actually explain why the universe is one way or another: all the possibilities exist in different worlds.
I think people delude themselves that science, at least as currently practised, is always objective.
Where is the rational thought behind this consciousness discussion? If all of you "critical thinkers" are really responding with "You just don't want to accept that consciousness can't be explained with science" then I have lost my last remaining bit of hope in humanity's intelligence.