In a world that is moving towards superintelligence, the only answer is superconsciousness. Starting with understanding what consciousness is. And that is a lot harder than you think.
A World Appears: A Journey Into Consciousness
Hence, “A World Appears: A Journey Into Consciousness”. What and where is consciousness? There’s something here that scientists can’t touch with their cold, hard assumptions and tools. Vital force, sense of self, frequency, agency, mental feelings, awareness, sentience, etc.
Some of the topics in the book
The book is indeed a journey. Covering materialism, panpsychism (everything is conscious), idealism (consciousness is a fundamental property of the universe), illusionism, quantum theory(consciousness is an active force in the construction of reality), integrated information theory, phenomenology, Descriptive Experience Sampling (DES), Nietzsche, inner speech, neurophenomenology, pure awareness, minimal consciousness, mind beyond brain and butterflies.
Cracking consciousness needs consciousness
One reason why consciousness has proved such a hard nut for science and philosophy is that the only tool we can use to crack it is consciousness itself. Consciousness is a labyrinth from which there is no exit. It could be that we simply have the wrong kind of science to approach a problem like consciousness, and it will take nothing short of a scientific revolution to fully grapple with the mystery. Consciousness is one of the few phenomena that haven’t surrendered to the sovereignty and stern rule of matter, at least not yet. For example, neuroscience has yet to identify the biological structures necessary to generate consciousness.
Cool concepts and questions
The book introduces all kinds of cool concepts and questions:
- Unthinking
- Mind before brain
- Protoconsciousness
- Storythinking (consciousness is a prediction machine)
- Consciousness in nature (plants, animals, insects, etc.)
- Mind and matter
- Metaphysics
- The plants returned your gaze
- Are brains a prerequisite for consciousness?
- Being cerebrocentric
- All conscious beings are sentient, but only some sentient beings are conscious.
- Plants can integrate information from more than twenty distinct “senses,” including all five of ours
- Consciousness versus intelligence
- Distributed, collective intelligence (plants, birds, forests, GAIA)
- Minds without neurons
- Xenobots
- bioelectric fields
- Anthrobots
- Kinematic replication
- Competence versus comprehension.
- Without a boundary, the system would soon dissolve into the general soup, losing its identity and form and thus ceasing to exist.
- System dynamics
- Biopsychism (the idea that all life is sentient)
- Only a sentient being will ever be able to recognise sentience in another.
- Shamanism
- Is consciousness purely a matter of information processing?
- Is consciousness rooted in feelings and embodiment?
- qualia—the fact that all our sensory experiences have a hard-to-describe but unmistakable qualitative dimension: the feeling of well-being we get from a first sip of wine, say, or the metallic bite of the air on the frigid December day
- Who ever heard of an unconscious feeling,a feeling that you cannot feel?
- Feelings convey information, certainly, but I don’t see how feelings could be conveyed in bits. The physiology behind feelings is distinct.
- conscious robots and the mechanistic properties of feelings
- What possible difference would homeostasis, or feelings (good or bad), make to an immortal being?
- Psychoactive drugs can profoundly alter consciousness (and have no discernible effect on computers).
- Can anything really matter or have meaning without life and death?”
- Embodied feeling like disgust is something an AI could ever duplicate
- AI have no sensorium and no social life.
- A robot can act like it’s in love, but it’s still a puppet being pulled by strings
- The internet is not the world so much as it is a shadow cast by the world.
- Abstraction simplifies a phenomenon in ways that allow us to better grasp its underlying structure. However, in the process, lots of stuff gets left out or ignored.
- A science of perception is not quite the same as a science of consciousness,
- The God’s-eye “view from nowhere” is itself a product of the very consciousness it seeks to transcend.
- The widespread use of mechanical metaphors for the mind
- Psychedelics work by lifting the constraints on our thinking, allowing us to tune into different “frequencies” of sensory experience, forge novel connections, and bring conscious and unconscious streams of thought into contact.
- Does consciousness consist of words; is inner speech the medium in which thought is conducted?
- “I” is the author of our thoughts, subject of our feelings, owner of our bodies, and conductor of the orchestras that make up our mental lives
- if this self is an illusion, whose illusion is it?
- You have to begin to lose your memory, if only in bits and pieces, to realise that memory is what makes our lives
- This process of repurposing the past in service to the present and future may be an essential function of consciousness.
- The relationship between consciousness, memory, and self is complicated and intricate, looping back on itself in multiple ways.
- The role of an internal “self-model,” a representation in our minds that helps us control our bodies and organise our experiences.
- Consciousness as the sum of inflexions.
Embodiment and consciousness
Our brains are minding our bodies twenty-four seven, taking in and processing tremendous amounts of information, both external and internal, without any of it crossing the threshold of our awareness. Does consciousness depend on having a body? The centrality of feeling and emotion to our experience of consciousness is scarcely mentioned in most theories of consciousness. The second fundamental fact is that in order to survive, all biological beings—and this includes plants—must maintain themselves within a narrow range of optimal states across a great many parameters; in animals, these parameters include temperature, blood pressure, blood chemistry, hydration, and so on. Most of this back-and-forth goes on beneath the threshold of consciousness. We must entertain the possibility that true feeling—the sort of mental state that humans experience when we feel—may indeed be restricted to wet biological tissue and may not be realisable in non-living artefacts.” So many of our feelings are, like desire, deeply rooted in the flesh.
An AI with a gut?
It’s not at all clear if an immersive, embodied feeling like disgust is something an AI could ever duplicate; it might well depend on Damasio and Man’s “wet biological tissue”—on having a gut as well as a brain. It is one of the paradoxes of computer science that the “higher” capabilities we once thought of as uniquely human—reason, language, intelligence—have proved easier for machines to master than the more elemental capabilities we share with animals, including feelings and emotions. For whatever reason, computers are far better at simulating the sorts of operations performed by the evolutionarily recent cortex than those performed by the older cerebellum (the seat of sensorimotor skills) or the ancient upper brainstem.
Consiousness
Each conscious mind selects which data it will admit and which it will suppress to construct its version of reality, like a sculptor finding form in a block of stone. The thoughts we have when we introspect are far from normal thoughts; they are inflected by the very process of being observed as thoughts and recorded in words. Moments in consciousness are not discrete; there’s always a background hum of sensory experience. Consciousness is not a series of discrete moments but, rather, a dynamic, ever-flowing stream in which every moment has implications for the next and the last. To focus on conscious thoughts is like focusing on the leaves of a tree and trying to understand them in isolation. The tree is the mind, and there’s a lot more to the mind than consciousness.
The self
With the self, we confront a mental phenomenon beyond sentience, feeling, or thought. For the self to become an object of thought, it must no longer be itself, which is foremost a subject.Try it for yourself. Close your eyes and search the space of your awareness. Let the flurries of normal waking consciousness settle, and accustom yourself to the absence of light. And yet who is witnessing the thoughts popping up and passing by? If the self is an illusion, then why do so many of us cling to it, insisting that it is something of substance? What does this do for us? Why do we cling to the idea of a self, placing great value on self-confidence and self-esteem, while simultaneously spending so much effort on self-transcendence, whether through meditation or psychedelics or experiences of art, awe, and flow?
The brain as a prediction machine
The brain is first and foremost a prediction machine. What we perceive represents the brain’s best guesses of what’s out there—its “unconscious inferences” as to the most likely causes of the sensory signals reaching the brain, based on prior experience, belief, and probability. The role of the senses is not to deliver the world to us as it “really” is but, rather, to error-correct, or update, the picture of reality that our minds infer, or predict, to be out there—in other words, to control the ongoing hallucination in which we live, lest it stray too far from reality. Reality would “load” in our mind’s eye far more slowly than it does when we predict it. Most of what we experience is predictable, and the deviations from the brain’s expectations can be corrected by our senses almost instantaneously.
Butterflies
For it to be reborn as a butterfly, virtually all of its cells must be destroyed or repurposed. Some of a caterpillar’s memories survive in the brain of the butterfly it becomes, but not before those memories themselves undergo a kind of metamorphosis. The actual details of the information that the caterpillar learned are completely useless to the butterfly. The memory gets compressed and revised to make it useful to the insect’s new circumstances and way of life. The process of repurposing the past in service to the present and future may be an essential function of consciousness. Think of the self not as a thing but as a process of sensemaking, continually rewriting the story of its past in order to equip itself for life in the present and future.
Machines
This sort of improvisation operates on multiple levels in nature and marks a crucial distinction between biological beings and machines. We count on our machines to be utterly faithful in their recall, not to revise memories on the fly to suit the moment. We don’t expect our machines to evolve, metamorphose, or acquire perspectives they can change at will.
Consciousness as an eternal loop
The relationship between consciousness, memory, and self is complicated and intricate, looping back on itself in multiple ways. Consciousness thus begins as this wide-open aperture in which “the world appears,” but with the arrival of memory, it soon contracts into a subjective point of view and, eventually, for better or worse, into a self.
Illustrating the problem with consciousness.
