| ▲ | d00d0ff000 4 hours ago |
| It does not. Consciousness is the echo chamber of the quantum domain, temporally propagating through cognitive technology. Memory and temporal propagation (awareness) give consciousness something to do, which makes it topically interesting and addressable. The quantum domain has a tremendous information density which scales through entanglement (by the tens of thousands or even millions in our neurons) allowing the ultra high definition holographic experience we (many of us) are familiar with. When quantum holographic memory is understood, consciousness will be better understood. The qubit is a dead end, this will be the indicator of scientific progress. |
|
| ▲ | __patchbit__ 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| Does living working memory bifurcate to logical and physical maps as happens to compute memory on kernel bring up after MMU and core coherence? That being the case an owl may know what it is like to be a bat. |
| |
| ▲ | d00d0ff000 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | The physical nervous system is one map, and the consciousness the “moment of continuity” (like a “moment of force” in physical systems). The memory (learned inference) is another map. Consciousness animates and iteratively influences in between. You can fantasize that you are an owl or a bat, doing so well enough can be quite convincing. Remember, wings are arms and hands (look at a skeletal picture, you will see what I mean.) | | |
| ▲ | lambdaone 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | I think you'd have great difficulty in doing either, as you are imagining what you think it might be like to be one of these animals are are almost certainly unable to encompass what they might feel it to be like; the case of bats is literally the subject of Thomas Nagel's What Is It Like to Be a Bat? | | |
|
|
|
| ▲ | PaulDavisThe1st 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Woo! |
|
| ▲ | AndrewKemendo 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Do you have any references for these claims? I’m also curious how you define consciousness. |
| |
| ▲ | mapontosevenths 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | > I’m also curious how you define consciousness. This is what I came here for. Every article or commenter that attempts to deduce the roots of consciousness should first start by defining it. I have yet to see anyone even bother to seriously try. If I spent all my time trying to figure out the fundamental forces involved in floopityjoop, but refused to ever define exactly what a floopityjoop was, you would ignore me, laugh at me, or feel pity for me. | | |
| ▲ | AndrewKemendo 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | Hence why I ask In my experience, “intelligence” and “consciousness” are socially defined categories and can’t be viewed objectively There’s too much social weight on those to have a firm definition because the social implications are too grave and nobody is willing to give up their philosophy for a precise definition | | |
| ▲ | mapontosevenths 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | Agreed, and just to add to that... It's important. In the past many attempts to define who (or even what) is and is not conscious led to the exclusion of certain classes of human and animal, and from there to atrocity beyond measure. The p-zombie problem is not only fundamental, it may be the single most important question in all of philosophy and science from a "first do no harm" perspective. It's not some academic "Umm acshually". The definition MATTERS, and can lead to real world suffering for living beings at massive scale when we get it wrong. So these regularly scheduled "Mechanism For Consciousness Discovered" blog posts that fail to define it first aren't just bad science, they're actively dangerous. EDIT - To tie it back to this post - If we assume that working memory is involved in consciousness, we exclude people who lack short-term memory. I had a friend in high school who lost most of his due to a traumatic brain injury caused by a car accident. He was, in fact, a conscious being. Just... very, very forgetful and unable to cope well with novel situations. | | |
| ▲ | d00d0ff000 13 minutes ago | parent [-] | | I define consciousness as “the inflection of the potential of existential being.” As my original comment suggests, I claim consciousness as the echo chamber of the quantum domain. Before you call it “quantum magic” understand that the “potential of existence” is the foundation of existential reality and we are “just inflecting” upon this through the electrochemical biotechnology of our brains. I propose all life and living systems are “of consciousness” however primitive, and memory, temporal awareness, even sense of self are holographic renderings within this domain. |
|
|
|
|
|
| ▲ | therobots927 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Very interesting. Do you have any links to material along these lines? |
| |
| ▲ | zulux 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | It conjecture, but in my opinion there's something about our brain based on the evidence. Three pounds of meat in one human brain can do things an entire datacenter of AI can't. Like fold clothing. | | |
|
|
| ▲ | lambdaone 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| > Consciousness is the echo chamber of the quantum domain [citation needed] |
| |
| ▲ | mrec 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | I've seen this bouncing around since the early 90s, with New Agey people like Danah Zohar, and probably predates even that. There never seemed to be a whole lot to it; not much more than "well, consciousness is weird, and quantum is weird, therefore consciousness is quantum". Or maybe "well, quantum is trendy, and I'd like to make a buck, therefore..." | | |
| ▲ | DonaldFisk 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | I'm unsure what to make of the post you're replying to, but the idea that there's a connexion between consciousness and quantum phenomena isn't just a New Age idea. Eugene Wigner wasn't New Agey, and he wrote Remarks on the Mind-Body Question, suggesting that wave function collapse only occurs when the consciousness of an an observer becomes aware of the result of a measurement, not the measuring apparatus, which is entangled with whatever is being measured, records it. | | |
| ▲ | lambdaone 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | For me the most plausible argument for "quantum consciousness" was made by Roger Penrose. I still don't believe it; we can demonstrate wavefunction collapse using experiments like the delayed-choice quantum eraser without anything conscious being involved (unless you believe in retrocausality or the cosmic conspiracy theory, or in panpsychism, which is really no weirder than the quantum consciousness ideas and also quite fun to contemplate). |
|
| |
| ▲ | bookofjoe 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | FWIW the only place I EVER see the phrase "citation needed" is on HN. That's not a good or a bad thing: it's simply an observation. | | |
|
