Person012345 t1_je9gac4 wrote on March 30, 2023 at 11:49 AM

Reply to comment by Unknown_Talker9273 in Eli5: Where does consiousness come from? by Unknown_Talker9273

The true, short answer that ELI5 won't actually let you give is "nobody knows".

Consciousness is a mystery, we don't even know what it actually is let alone how it works. It's one of the areas that is still open to a multitude of spiritual interpretations. And if it is merely an emergent phenomena of bio-electric interactions between brain cells, which is what one might be tempted to think scientifically, then I think this leads to a big question of what other interactions could also give rise to some form of consciousness (albeit an experience that we may not even recognise as consciousness yet).

And to what degree do the electrical interactions in computers give rise to a form of consciousness? Again, it may not be a human-level, free-will having, life-enjoying experience, but when you look at very simple creatures driven mostly by instinct and not decision making, I think it's silly to suggest they aren't conscious, yet I also think their experience of their conscious existence is probably extremely dissimilar to our own. Go several steps down that rung and maybe you get to computers and I wonder where the concept of "consciousness" ceases to exist, if indeed it ever does at all.

Does it apply to gravitational interactions? Nuclear interactions? Does any of this even really matter?

Farnsworthson t1_jea25jw wrote on March 30, 2023 at 2:45 PM

>we don't even know what it actually is let alone how it works

That's the core issue. Until you define what conciousness actually IS (and by "define" I mean in scientific terms that could in principle be used to make testable predictions, not in untestable philosophical generalities and ambiguities), it's redundant to attempt an explanation; you're just playing with words and hoping that nobody notices. Personally, I feel it's strongly connected to (in a complex organism may even be equivalent to) a complexity of brain function that allows it to observe and consider what and how it is "thinking" - to include at an adequate level its own "thought processes" as input data, in other words. That seems to me to be pretty much where the existence of a sense of "self" has to start. But that's just my two penn'orth.

("Brain", "organism" etc. here being simple shorthand - I'm quite comfortable with the prospect of, say, a non-organic mechanism having conciousness. Again - until you define what that IS, you most definitely can't exclude possibilities based on what feels suspiciously like pure anthropomorphic prejudice. Oh - and given the number of rather capable AIs suddenly out there - we could probably do with something approaching a definiton quite urgently. Just saying...)

(I have a similar definitional issue with "free will". Define it (in purely scientific, non-"spiritual" terms) - show me what it might actually mean scientifically for a mechanism or organism to have "free will" - and we can start talking sensibly about it.)