Here is the question: is there any correlation between consciousness and intelligence? There are a wide range of creatures that exhibit signs of consciousness, and it is arguable that computers have tremendous potential for dynamic, abstract intelligence, but there are lots of types of apparently conscious creatures that are pretty stupid, and it is not evident that computers will ever be able to attain consciousness (precisely because their state is arbitrarily interruptible and arbitrarily rebootable).
Thus, if there is some sort of “universal consciousness”, there is no reason to believe that we would recognize it. Our consciousness appears to be a biological affect, based on the survival instinct. A universal consciousness would not have that basis, so it would at least not be similar to ours in that respect. I mean, it is a very appealing notion, that we would merge into the infinimind when we die, but there is nothing substantive to support it.
You lost me with the “precisely because” clause. To begin with, human consciousness is also interruptible and rebootable – we go to sleep every night and reboot in the morning. You could, of course, note that our minds don’t shut down, but I would rebut that our consciousness does.
A computer or other machine that devotes large amounts of resources to internal modeling and self-observation, might be said to be conscious.
Obviously, this issue is the subject of endless debate, and I don’t want to highjack it too far. We don’t have to go into the Chinese Room or anything. I just wanted to quibble with two words you used.
What do you mean by intelligence? I don’t know about you, but my subconscious is very intelligent. It solves writing problems, does anagrams, and even writes programs without me being consciously aware of it - the answer just pops into my mind. I had a border collie mix who was a genius, and I figure his intelligence worked the same way. Some of our intelligence involved consciousness, and we know we are intelligent because we’re conscious. But consciousness is not a requirement for doing intelligent things,
We’re conscious for a reason, and the universe certainly doesn’t have the same reason to be conscious. It doesn’t need to survive and attract a mate, and there’d be no mysteries to wax philosophic about. It doesn’t have anything to do. If it was conscious in the sense that we are, all it could do is sit back and watch itself expand for billions of years. Ho hum.
Bingo on the first paragraph – in essence, each of us owns an awareness that “dies” every night (perchance to dream…) and resurrects some time later. One could argue that every waking period in our lives is a separate lifetime, up until the end of the cycle when we fall asleep for the final time*…and then what happens?*
Computers, if actually aware (and how could we ever find out?) could be said to match this cycle of cyclical lifetimes, but we must keep in mind that awareness/consciousness does not equal “free will” – computers must think in a very linear, black vs. white fashion (their “brains” are composed solely of a series of on/off switches, after all) and hence are unable to question philosophical mysteries such as “Illegal operation”, “Divide by zero error” or “Page not found.”
Problem is, a computer could have a remarkably adaptive program that looks like conscious self-awareness, but we can never be sure that it is or that it is just a really, really good simulation of self-awareness. I guess the definitive test might be to make a chip-for-chip byte-for-byte copy of the system in a known state and examining it running to see if any differences can be detected.
I think that is just a restatement of my assertion. The fact that your intelligence seems to function well at both levels strongly suggests that consciousness and intelligent are independent of each other. (By intelligence, I mean the ability to understand abstract ideas like π, February or where McMurdo Base is when you have never been there.)
There’s no “reason” to be conscious – “reason” itself is an abstract concept that humans apply to the world, not the other way around. And you’re falling prey to Hawking’s “Anthropic Principle” by presuming that The Universe, if conscious, would bear any resemblance whatsoever to human-like consciousness. In fact, The Universal Consciousness would be totally indecipherable by humanity – imagine a worker bee attempting to understand how a human thinks, and increase that by 1,000,000 orders of magnitude. It’s impossible, simply can’t be done.
You could say the universe is purple like a grape. But not purple in the same way a grape is actually purple, because it’s so much bigger and more complex than a grape - in fact, it’s purple in some way that is in fact indecipherable and imperceptible as purple by anyone so puny as a human.
Which is in fact another way of saying that it isn’t purple.
“Reason” is an abstract concept in the same way as “speed” or “purple” are abstract concepts: tools which we use to make sense of reality. In this context “reason” is synonymous with “cause”, and there is in fact a reason for our consciousness: survival. If we were merely rational beings with no need to give consideration to our persistence, it is not obvious that we would require consciousness. We are conscious souly because we are alive and mortal, otherwise consciousness would be superfluous.
From an evolutionary perspectives, it’s possible that consciousness is merely an accidental side-effect. It may serve a survival purpose and it may not.
Personally, I suspect that consciousness is a side-effect of the our brains adapting to perform very complicated social computations. If I’m going to predict your behavior, I need to have a mental model of you. And that mental model of you has to include your mental model of me. Our ability to simulate our own mental states may allow us to cooperate/lie in ways that would be impossible otherwise.
If this is true, it might not be possible to create a computer that simulates consciousness without it actually being conscious.
It’s an overreach and an oversimplification to say consciousness drives or created things.
Interaction, yeah.
Consciousness does seem to be invoked by interaction and I have enough nonmaterialist woo in my worldview to subscribe to your newsletter, as it were, but I’m also a cautious and conservative woo-embracer. Among other things, I’m aware of how logical categories cease to behave themselves in ordinary ways when you try to apply ordinary logic to extraordinary concepts. You can come to believe that consciousness is a manifestation of interaction and you can observe that everything is composed of interactions and together that can LOOK LIKE compelling reason to conclude that everything is imbued with consciousness. But when we do this kind of thinking we’re using categories themselves differently than the conventional.
I see that’s been answered already, but I’ll give it my own shot.
The reason (as in “cause”) that we’re conscious is because it gave us a survival advantage. The universe is under no pressure to survive and doesn’t need the advantage that consciousness would give it. We don’t see it thinking and planning its next move. All of its moves appear to be preordained without any conscious intervention.
The only consciousness we’re aware of is our own, and that, by necessity, is the default standard by which we measure consciousness in other entities. Of course it’s possible the universe is super-conscious in some way but if it is, we have no evidence of it and probably couldn’t even perceive it, let alone understand it. It wouldn’t be consciousness as we understand it.
Reading that line is one of the rewards of our consciousness. Let’s see the universe come up with a line like that.
Oh man, I’m way over my head here. I see from this page that Planck was certainly a theist.
My armchair understanding of Quantum Mechanics can’t rule out an underlying universal consciousness. Whether human brains can communicate with that universal consciousness or experience an afterlife are entirely separate issues. So this doesn’t have to be about religion.
I mean the idea that the act of measuring a particle determines… crap I can’t articulate this. I’ll just link to the Von Neumann–Wigner interpretation of Quantum Mechanics whereby, “…consciousness is postulated to be necessary for the completion of the process of quantum measurement”, as wiki describes it.
The Von Neumann–Wigner interpretation hasn’t exactly been refuted though. There are a number of interpretations of Quantum Mechanics and all of them are non-intuitive. Many are ludicrous, though possibly correct. I understand that Feinman’s take was something like, “It’s confusing. You don’t like it? Tough.”
Say there’s a universal observer. Call him Gremlin. AFAIK (which is damn little) that’s consistent with QM. And I was hoping that some physics experts (a Bachelors of Science in the subject would do) could dis-entangle a portion of my endless confusion on the topic.
