Comment on Is Everyone Conscious in the Same Way? | Simon Roper

• givesomefucks@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Bruh. We literally don’t even know what consciousness is.

  Probably the smartest living human has spent decades looking into it as a passion project after he and Hawking completed Einsteins physics.

  But dude is a realist, he’s 90 years old and long ago accepted he won’t live to hear the answer.

  We don’t know how anesthesia works either, so he looked into that and the best he got was it interrupts a quantom wave collapse in our brains, but anesthesia shuts us down when some of those quantom waves have stopped collapsing, but not enough to make the math work out for it to be the cause.

  So maybe Roger Penrose just wasted his retirement on this passion project?

  In all likelihood we won’t know for decades, and even then it doesn’t really answer the question.

  To give you some idea how slowly this shit moves, Penrose just won the 2020 Novel in Physics for shit he theorized in 1964…

  www.nobelprize.org/prizes/physics/2020/…/facts/

  He wrote a book on it back in the day:

  en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadows_of_the_Mind

  And again, this is probably the smartest living human, has spent decades looking into it, and his result was “I dunno, maybe look at this?”

  So if anyone ever tries to tell you that anyone knows what consciousness is. You know they’re talking out of their ass.

  As long as capitalism drives science, we’ll never know. Because there’s no money in finding it out, and we’re at the point of looking at freaking quantum wave collapse inside of neurons, it’s not exactly something that’s easy or cheap to investigate.

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  • icosahedron@ttrpg.network ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    i’d agree that we don’t really understand consciousness. i’d argue it’s more an issue of defining consciousness and what that encompasses than knowing its biological background. if we knew what to look for, we’d find it. also anesthesia isn’t really a problem at all. in fact, we know exactly how general anesthesia works

    and Penroses’s Orch OR theory was never meant to explain anesthesia. it’s a more general theory concerning the overall existence of consciousness in the first place. however, anesthesia does relate to the theory, in that it could play a role in proving it (i think? not a primary source but it’s where i found that info)

    besides that, Orch OR isn’t exactly a great model in the first place, or at least from a neurological standpoint. even among theories of consciousness, Orch OR is particularly controversial and not widely accepted. i’m no expert and i could be misunderstanding, so please correct me if i’m missing something that would indicate Orch OR is considered even remotely plausible compared to other consciousness theories. this paper certainly had some things to say about it in the context of the validity of theories of consciousness (see V.1 class I).

    other theories seem more promising. global workspace theory seems particularly well supported by neurology. its criticisms mainly focus on how GWT fails to truly explain the nature of consciousness. but is that an issue any theory can resolve? again, the problem lies in the definition of consciousness.

    then we have integrated information theory. it’s a more mathematical model that aims to quantify the human experience. but you know what? it’s also controversial and highly debated, to the point that it’s been called pseudoscientific because it implies a degree of panpsychism. it’s clearly not a perfect theory.

    point is, you’re right. we don’t really get consciousness. we have some wild guesses out there, and penrose’s theory is certainly one of them. genius as penrose is, Orch OR isn’t empirically testable. we don’t know, and maybe can’t know - which is precisely why neuroscience searches elsewhere

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    • bunchberry@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      i’d agree that we don’t really understand consciousness. i’d argue it’s more an issue of defining consciousness and what that encompasses than knowing its biological background.

      Personally, no offense, but I think this a contradiction in terms. If we cannot define “consciousness” then you cannot say we don’t understand it. Don’t understand what? If you have not defined it, then saying we don’t understand it is like saying we don’t understand akokasdo. There is nothing to understand about akokasdo because it doesn’t mean anything.

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  • bunchberry@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Bruh. We literally don’t even know what consciousness is.

    You are starting from the premise that there is this thing out there called “consciousness” that needs some sort of unique “explanation.” You have to justify that premise. I do agree there is difficulty in figuring out the precise algorithms and physical mechanics that the brain uses to learn so efficiently, but somehow I don’t think this is what you mean by that.

    We don’t know how anesthesia works either, so he looked into that and the best he got was it interrupts a quantom wave collapse in our brains

    There is no such thing as “wave function collapse.” The state vector is just a list of probability amplitudes and you reduce those list of probability amplitudes to a definite outcome because you observed what that outcome is. If I flip a coin and it has a 50% chance of being heads and a 50% chance of being tails, and it lands on tails, I reduce the probability distribution to 100% probability for tails. There is no “collapse” going on here. Objectifying the state vector is a popular trend when talking about quantum mechanics but has never made any sense at all.

    So maybe Roger Penrose just wasted his retirement on this passion project?

    Depends on whether or not he is enjoying himself. If he’s having fun, then it isn’t a waste.

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  • gandalf_der_12te@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    And again, this is probably the smartest living human, has spent decades looking into it, and his result was “I dunno, maybe look at this?” So if anyone ever tries to tell you that anyone knows what consciousness is. You know they’re talking out of their ass.

    As long as capitalism drives science, we’ll never know. Because there’s no money in finding it out, and we’re at the point of looking at freaking quantum wave collapse inside of neurons, it’s not exactly something that’s easy or cheap to investigate.

    I just want to point out that there has been philosophy before capitalism, and a lot of clever people looked into the question of consciousness without capitalist interests. As such, a lot of modern science doesn’t really focus on it; but nevertheless, there’s a lot of clever thoughts about it. Like in chinese buddhism, there’s views of what consciousness means in sometimes great detail that really make sense to me. Saying we don’t know anything about consciousness because modern science doesn’t is wrong, i think.

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