A landscape of consciousness: Toward a taxonomy of explanations and implications
The article presents a taxonomy of consciousness theories, ranging from physicalist to non-physicalist perspectives. Various theories like Materialism, Quantum Theories, and Dualisms are discussed, exploring implications for AI and immortality.
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The article discusses a taxonomy of explanations and implications related to consciousness. Various theories are categorized on a spectrum from physicalist to non-physicalist perspectives, including Materialism Theories, Non-Reductive Physicalism, Quantum Theories, Panpsychisms, Monisms, Dualisms, and more. Each theory is self-described by its proponents without much critique or attempts to reconcile differences. The implications of these theories are explored in relation to questions of meaning, AI consciousness, virtual immortality, and survival after death. The landscape of consciousness offers a broad perspective on the diverse explanations put forth. The article provides a framework for understanding the different viewpoints on consciousness and their potential implications.
13 comments(quote)
His core argument against materialism, in its original form, is deceptively (and delightfully) simple:
1. In our world, there are conscious experiences.
2. There is a logically possible world physically identical to ours, in which the positive facts about consciousness in our world do not hold.
3. Therefore, facts about consciousness are further facts about our world, over and above the physical facts.
4. So, materialism is false.
Point 2 is textbook begging the question: it imagines a world which is physically identical to ours but consciousness is different there. That is baking in the presupposition that consciousness is not a physical process. Points 3 and 4 then "cleverly" detect the very contradiction he has planted and claims victory.
This is theology. What's it doing in Elsevier's "Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology"?
Most of the classical arguments in this area are now obsolete. The classic big question, presented in the article, was, “Out of meat, how do you get thought?". That's no longer so mysterious. You get some basic processing elements from molecular biology. The puzzle, for a long time, was, can a large number of basic processing elements with no overall design self-organize into intelligence. Then came LLMs, which do exactly that.
If you think the answer might be no, then congratulations, you actually believe in immaterial souls, no matter how materialist or rationalist you otherwise claim to be.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40466814 The paper is linked and disused in this thread. Her description of the void before having language is eye opening.
"I have discussed consciousness with over 200 scientists and philosophers who work on or think about consciousness and related fields (Closer To Truth YouTube; Closer To Truth website)."
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLFJr3pJl27pJKWEUWv9X5...
> Feedback is appreciated, critique too—especially explanations or theories of consciousness not included, or not described accurately, or not classified properly; also, improvements of the classification typology.
I think RK would enjoy Humberto Maturana’s take on cognition and self-cognition. Maturana usually does not use the word “consciousness”.
Start with Maturana’s book with Francisco Valera:
Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realization of the Living (1970)
The appendix of this book is important (“The Nervous System”). Last few pages blew my brain or mind ;-)
Thinking about consciousness without thinking more deeply about temporality is one problem most (or perhaps even all) models of consciousness still have.
Since Robert Kuhn works in thalamocortical activity the theme of timing should resonant.
How can we tell if another person is conscious or not?
As far as I see, this is not possible and will never be possible. Hence the "hard problem".
It take consciousness to be emanating from particles the size of atoms. They word those atomic particles as 'atma' ( in english souls, some even call it spiriton!).Those particles are fundamental to the universe and indivisible like quarks, bosons etc. Like radiation emanating from sun, it handles consciousness as 'emanating' from soul.
Each and every living being starting from size of a cell has a soul feeling (partially) about mechanisms of its body. A multi-cellular organism is then explained as a universe in itself where millions of cells with souls are thriving. The organism will then contain a 'chief soul' directing the working of whole body (which will be us case of humans). Further the philosophy expands this concept to the real universe in which all organisms with their individual consciousness are directed by a chief 'super consciousness'( in Vedic terminology it is termed as paramatma, some translate that as equal to God Concept) Although then it further expands by saying that there are infinite (almost) parallel universes but that's other thing...
1. Consciousness is primitive. That is, interior experience is a fundamental property of the universe: any information system in the universe that has certain properties has an interior experience,
2. Within the human population, interior experience varies vastly between individuals.
Assertion 2 is informed through discussion with others. Denial of Chalmer's hard problem doesn't make sense to me. Like it seems logically flawed to argue that consciousness is emergent. Interior experience can't "emerge" from the traditional laws of physics, it's like a nonsense argument. The observation that folks really challenge this makes me deeply believe that the interior experience across humans is not at all uniform. The interior experience of somebody who vehemently denies the hard problem must be so much different from my interior experience to the extend that the divide can't be bridged.
Another up to date compilation of 15 articles on Electromagnetic Field Theories of Consciousness: Opportunities and Obstacles is available here https://www.frontiersin.org/research-topics/18437/electromag...
One of the authors (Joachim Keppler) has a very interesting recent paper here https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/human-neuroscience/arti...
Panpsychism seems neat to think about.